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

8.8.4

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

0.10.10.1

Dependency of ghc library

containers

0.6.2.1

Dependency of ghc library

deepseq

1.4.4.0

Dependency of ghc library

directory

1.3.6.0

Dependency of ghc library

filepath

1.4.2.1

Dependency of ghc library

ghc-boot-th

8.8.4

Internal compiler library

ghc-boot

8.8.4

Internal compiler library

ghc-compact

0.1.0.0

Core library

ghc-heap

8.8.4

GHC heap-walking library

ghc-prim

0.5.3

Core library

ghci

8.8.4

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

8.8.4

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

1.6.9.0

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