1 The Glasgow Haskell Compiler -- version 4.06
2 ==============================================
4 We are pleased to announce a new release of the Glasgow Haskell
5 Compiler (GHC), version 4.06. The source distribution is freely
6 available via the World-Wide Web and through anon. FTP; details below.
8 Haskell is "the" standard lazy functional programming language; the
9 current language version is Haskell 98, agreed in December 1998.
10 Haskell related information is available from the Haskell home page at
12 http://www.haskell.org/
14 GHC's Web page lives at
16 http://www.haskell.org/ghc/
21 This should be a stable release. We have not made major changes
22 since 4.04 to the core compiler, but we have fixed lots of bugs.
23 We believe that 4.06 is in a nice stable well-tested state. (Ha!)
25 Apart from that, there are the following changes
27 - Major library reorganisation. All libraries, except the ones that
28 are part of the Haskell 98 *language* specification, have moved to
29 fptools/hslibs/. The hslibs tree is independent of GHC, shared between
30 GHC, Hugs, and (we hope) other Haskell implementations.
31 The idea is to make it easier for people to contribute and maintain
34 The hslibs/ tree is organised in a Java-like fashion. Details in
35 the new Library guide. <url please>
37 Existing programs that use the -syslib flag may need to change which
40 - Support for "foreign export dynamic".
42 - Clean up of concurrent I/O system; in particular, I/O is now non-blocking,
43 except (alas) on stdout/stderr for tiresome reasons.
45 - Some refinements to the exceptions mechanism <url please>
47 - More performance tuning: compiled programs now allocate 10% less than 4.04
49 For full details see the release notes:
51 http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/users_guide/users_guide-1.html#ss1.4
56 We run mailing lists for GHC users and bug reports; to subscribe, send
57 mail to majordomo@haskell.org; the msg body should be:
59 subscribe glasgow-haskell-<which> Your Name <your-email@where.you.are>
61 Please send bug reports about GHC to glasgow-haskell-bugs@haskell.org ; GHC
62 users hang out on glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org
65 + On-line GHC-related resources
66 ================================
68 Relevant URLs on the World-Wide Web:
70 GHC home page http://www.haskell.org/ghc/
71 Haskell home page http://www.haskell.org/
72 comp.lang.functional FAQ http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/Department/Staff/mpj/faq.html
78 The easy way is to go to the WWW page, which should be
81 http://www.haskell.org/ghc/
83 Once you have the distribution, please follow the pointers in the
84 README file to find all of the documentation about this release. NB:
85 preserve modification times when un-tarring the files (no `m' option
90 ======================
92 To compile up this source-only release, you need a machine with 32+MB
93 memory, GNU C (`gcc'), `perl' plus a version of GHC installed (3.02 at
94 least). This release is known to work on the following platforms:
96 * i386-unknown-{linux,solaris2,freebsd,netbsd,cygwin32}
97 * sparc-sun-{sunos4,solaris2}
98 * hppa1.1-hp-hpux{9,10}
100 Ports to the following platforms should be relatively easy, but
101 haven't been tested due to lack of time/hardware:
105 * {rs6000,powerpc}-ibm-aix
107 The installer's guide included in distribution gives a complete
108 run-down of what-ports-work; an on-line version can be found at
110 http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/installation_guide/installing.html