4. Release notes for version 8.8.2

GHC 8.8.2 is a minor release intended to fix regressions and minor bugs in the 8.8.1.

4.1. Highlights

  • A bug (Issue #17088) in the compacting garbage collector resulting in segmentation faults under specific circumstances. Note that this may affect user programs even if they did not explicitly request the compacting GC (using the -c RTS flag) since GHC may fallback to compacting collection during times of high memory pressure.
  • A code generator bug (Issue #17334) resulting in GHC panics has been fixed.
  • A bug in process causing builds using hsc2hs to fail non-deterministically on Windows has been fixed (Issue #17480)
  • A typechecker bug (Issue #17112) resulting in GHC panicking on some programs has been fixed.
  • A bug (Issue #16707) in the implementation of software transactional memory potentially resulting in hanging transactions has been fixed.
  • A bug in the implementation of compact normal forms resulting in segmentation faults in some uses (Issue #17044) has been fixed.
  • A bug causing GHC to incorrectly complain about incompatible LLVM versions when using LLVM 7.0.1 has been fixed (Issue #16990).

4.2. Known issues

  • A long-standing bug (Issue #16893) which can cause some applications of unsafeCoerce to segmentation fault is only partially fixed in this release. This release only avoids this issue in the uses of unsafeCoerce in Data.Typeable.Internal, which was the proximate cause of Issue #16893.

    However, it is possible that this bug could manifest in user-code using unsafeCoerce to perform dynamic type checks. See the ticket for details.

4.3. Included libraries

The package database provided with this distribution also contains a number of packages other than GHC itself. See the changelogs provided with these packages for further change information.

Package Version Reason for inclusion
ghc 8.8.2 The compiler itself
Cabal 3.0.1.0 Dependency of ghc-pkg utility
Win32 2.6.1.0 Dependency of ghc library
array 0.5.4.0 Dependency of ghc library
base 4.13.0.0 Core library
binary 0.8.7.0 Dependency of ghc library
bytestring 0.10.10.0 Dependency of ghc library
containers 0.6.2.1 Dependency of ghc library
deepseq 1.4.4.0 Dependency of ghc library
directory 1.3.4.0 Dependency of ghc library
filepath 1.4.2.1 Dependency of ghc library
ghc-boot-th 8.8.2 Internal compiler library
ghc-boot 8.8.2 Internal compiler library
ghc-compact 0.1.0.0 Core library
ghc-heap 8.8.2 GHC heap-walking library
ghc-prim 0.5.3 Core library
ghci 8.8.2 The REPL interface
haskeline 0.7.5.0 Dependency of ghci executable
hpc 0.6.0.3 Dependency of hpc executable
integer-gmp 1.0.2.0 Core library
libiserv 8.8.2 Internal compiler library
mtl 2.2.2 Dependency of Cabal library
parsec 3.1.14.0 Dependency of Cabal library
pretty 1.1.3.6 Dependency of ghc library
process 1.6.7.0 Dependency of ghc library
stm 2.5.0.0 Dependency of haskeline library
template-haskell 2.15.0.0 Core library
terminfo 0.4.1.4 Dependency of haskeline library
text 1.2.4.0 Dependency of Cabal library
time 1.9.3 Dependency of ghc library
transformers 0.5.6.2 Dependency of ghc library
unix 2.7.2.2 Dependency of ghc library
xhtml 3000.2.2.1 Dependency of haddock executable