1 The Glasgow Haskell Compiler -- version 0.26
2 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
4 We are proud to announce a new public release of the Glasgow Haskell
5 Compiler (GHC, version 0.26). Sources and binaries are freely
6 available by anonymous FTP and on the World-Wide Web; details below.
8 Haskell is "the" standard lazy functional programming language [see
9 SIGPLAN Notices, May 1992]. The current language version is 1.2. GHC
10 provides some proposed features of 1.3, notably monadic I/O.
12 The Glasgow Haskell project seeks to bring the power and elegance of
13 functional programming to bear on real-world problems. To that end,
14 GHC lets you call C (including cross-system garbage collection),
15 provides good profiling tools, supports ever richer I/O, and (with
16 this release) adds concurrency. Our goal is to make it the "tool of
17 choice for real-world applications".
19 Highlights of what's new in GHC 0.26 since 0.24 (March 1995):
21 * Concurrent Haskell: with this, you can build programs out of many
22 I/O-performing, interacting `threads'. We have a draft paper
23 about Concurrent Haskell, and our forthcoming Haggis GUI toolkit
26 * Parallel Haskell, running on top of PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine)
27 and hence portable to pretty much any parallel architecture,
28 whether shared memory or distributed memory. With this, your
29 Haskell program runs on multiple processors, guided by `par` and
30 `seq` annotations. The first pretty-much-everyone-can-try-it
31 parallel functional programming system! NB: The parallel stuff is
32 "research-tool quality"... consider this an alpha release.
34 * "Foldr/build" deforestation (by Andy Gill) is in, as are
35 "SPECIALIZE instance" pragmas (by Patrick Sansom).
37 * The LibPosix library provides an even richer I/O interface than
38 the standard 1.3 I/O library. A program like a shell or an FTP
39 client can be written in Haskell -- examples included.
41 * Yet more cool libraries: Readline (GNU command-line editing),
42 Socket (BSD sockets), Regex and MatchPS (GNU regular expressions).
43 By Darren Moffat and Sigbjorn Finne.
45 * New ports -- Linux (a.out) and MIPS (Silicon Graphics).
47 * NB: configuration has changed yet again -- for the better, of
50 Please see the release notes for a complete discussion of What's New.
52 To run this release, you need a machine with 16+MB memory, GNU C
53 (`gcc'), and `perl'. We have seen GHC 0.26 work on these platforms:
54 alpha-dec-osf2, hppa1.1-hp-hpux9, i386-unknown-linuxaout,
55 m68k-sun-sunos4, mips-sgi-irix5, and sparc-sun-{sunos4,solaris2}.
56 Similar platforms should work with minimal hacking effort.
57 The installer's guide give a full what-ports-work report.
59 Binaries are now distributed in `bundles', e.g. a "profiling bundle"
60 or a "concurrency bundle" for your platform. Just grab the ones you
63 Once you have the distribution, please follow the pointers in
64 ghc/README to find all of the documentation about this release. NB:
65 preserve modification times when un-tarring the files (no `m' option
68 We run mailing lists for GHC users and bug reports; to subscribe, send
69 mail to glasgow-haskell-{users,bugs}-request@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk.
70 Please send bug reports to glasgow-haskell-bugs.
72 Particular thanks to: Jim Mattson (author of much of the code) who has
73 now moved to HP in California; and the Turing Institute who donated a
74 lot of SGI cycles for the SGI port.
76 Simon Peyton Jones and Will Partain
80 Relevant URLs on the World-Wide Web:
82 GHC home page http://www.dcs.glasgow.ac.uk/fp/software/ghc.html
83 Glasgow FP group page http://www.dcs.glasgow.ac.uk/fp/
84 comp.lang.functional FAQ http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/Department/Staff/mpj/faq.html
86 ======================================================================
89 This release is available by anonymous FTP from the main Haskell
90 archive sites, in the directory pub/haskell/glasgow:
92 ftp.dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (130.209.240.50)
93 ftp.cs.chalmers.se (129.16.227.140)
94 haskell.cs.yale.edu (128.36.11.43)
96 The Glasgow site is mirrored by src.doc.ic.ac.uk (146.169.43.1), in
97 computing/programming/languages/haskell/glasgow.
99 These are the available files (.gz files are gzipped) -- some are `on
100 demand', ask if you don't see them:
102 ghc-0.26-src.tar.gz The source distribution; about 3MB.
104 ghc-0.26.ANNOUNCE This file.
106 ghc-0.26.{README,RELEASE-NOTES} From the distribution; for those who
107 want to peek before FTPing...
109 ghc-0.26-ps-docs.tar.gz Main GHC documents in PostScript format; in
110 case your TeX setup doesn't agree with our
113 ghc-0.26-<platform>.tar.gz Basic binary distribution for a particular
114 <platform>. Unpack and go: you can compile
115 and run Haskell programs with nothing but one
116 of these files. NB: does *not* include
117 profiling (see below).
119 <platform> ==> alpha-dec-osf2
121 i386-unknown-linuxaout
122 i386-unknown-solaris2
128 ghc-0.26-<bundle>-<platform>.tar.gz
130 <platform> ==> as above
131 <bundle> ==> prof (profiling)
132 conc (concurrent Haskell)
134 gran (GranSim parallel simulator)
135 ticky (`ticky-ticky' counts -- for implementors)
136 prof-conc (profiling for "conc[urrent]")
137 prof-ticky (ticky for "conc[urrent]")
139 ghc-0.26-hc-files.tar.gz Basic set of intermediate C (.hc) files for the
140 compiler proper, the prelude, and `Hello,
141 world'. Used for bootstrapping the system.
144 ghc-0.26-<bundle>-hc-files.tar.gz Further sets of .hc files, for
145 building other "bundles", e.g., profiling.
147 ghc-0.26-hi-files-<blah>.tar.gz Sometimes it's more convenient to
148 use a different set of interface files than
149 the ones in *-src.tar.gz. (The installation
150 guide will advise you of this.)
152 We could provide diffs from previous versions of GHC, should you
153 require them. A full set would be very large (7MB).