5. Release notes for version 8.6.3

GHC 8.6.3 is a bug-fix release, fixing a few regressions found in 8.6.1 and 8.6.2. As some of these issues are soundness issues users are strongly encouraged to upgrade.

5.1. Highlights

The highlights, since the 8.6.2 release, are:

  • A bug resulting in segmentation faults in some programs has been fixed (Trac #15892)
  • Darwin binary distributions are now correctly built against an in-tree libgmp (Trac #15404)
  • Three bugs leading to linker failures on Windows has been fixed (Trac #15105, Trac #15894, Trac #15934)
  • A bug leading to programs with deep stacks crashing when run with retainer profiling enabled has been fixed (Trac #14758)
  • A bug resulting in potential heap corruption during stable name allocation has been fixed (Trac #15906)
  • Plugins are now loaded during GHCi sessions (Trac #15633)

5.2. Known issues

Note that the LLVM code generator (-fllvm) in GHC 8.6, as well as all earlier releases, are affected by Trac #14251, which can result in miscompilation of some programs calling functions with unboxed floating-point arguments. While originally scheduled to be fixed for this release, the fix ended up being more difficult than anticipated and, given that issue is not a strict regression from 8.4, we decided to proceed with the release.

5.3. 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 8.6.5 The compiler itself
Cabal 2.4.0.1 Dependency of ghc-pkg utility
Win32 2.6.1.0 Dependency of ghc library
array 0.5.3.0 Dependency of ghc library
base 4.12.0.0 Core library
binary 0.8.6.0 Dependency of ghc library
bytestring 0.10.8.2 Deppendency of ghc library
containers 0.6.0.1 Dependency of ghc library
deepseq 1.4.4.0 Dependency of ghc library
directory 1.3.3.0 Dependency of ghc library
filepath 1.4.2.1 Dependency of ghc library
ghc-boot 8.6.5 Internal compiler library
ghc-compact 0.1.0.0 Core library
ghc-prim 0.5.3 Core library
ghci 8.6.5 The REPL interface
haskeline 0.7.4.3 Dependency of ghci executable
hpc 0.6.0.3 Dependency of hpc executable
integer-gmp 1.0.2.0 Core library
mtl 2.2.2 Dependency of Cabal library
parsec 3.1.13.0 Dependency of Cabal library
process 1.6.5.0 Dependency of ghc library
template-haskell 2.14.0.0 Core library
text 1.2.3.1 Dependency of Cabal library
time 1.8.0.2 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