The significant changes to the various parts of the compiler are listed in the following sections. There have also been numerous bug fixes and performance improvements over the 6.10 branch.
A new flag -no-rtsopts
flag allows you to
disable parsing of +RTS ...
options by the
run-time system.
In some use-cases, when a program can be run as another user,
this can cause security problems. For example,
myprog -tsomefile
will overwrite
somefile
if the other user has permissions
to do so.
The mingw installation bundled with GHC on Windows now includes a C++ compiler again.
Support for the FreeBSD, Dragonfly and Haiku OSes has been improved.
Datatypes with a context but no constructors, e.g.
data Show a => T a
are accepted again.
Importing qualified names is now an error.
ghc-pkg
now ensures that the conf files
it writes are UTF8.
The parsing of tracing flags has changed; see Section 4.15.6, “Tracing” for details.
Version number 1.8.0.4 (was 1.8.0.2)
Distribution.ModuleName.simple
has been
deprecated; use
Distribution.ModuleName.fromString
instead.
Version number 1.0.1.1 (was 1.0.1.0)
System.Directory.doesFileExist
on Unix-like
OSes now correctly identifies various types of special file
as files.
All the dph packages are version 0.4.0.