The Glasgow Haskell Compiler

A floating point regression in 7.0.3 affecting x86 has been fixed. The GHCi linker now handles partially stripped object files. This fixes loading the ghc package in ghci when it's been stripped, which is often the case in Linux distribution packages. A bug that caused bad results from getCPUTime, getClockTime, and getCurrentTime has been fixed. Several runtime system bugs were fixed. Incorrect directory permissions when installing have been fixed. Some improvements have been made to the new Cabal testsuite support.

GHC now defaults to the Haskell 2010 language standard. -fglasgow-exts is now deprecated in favour of the individual extension flags. On POSIX platforms, there is a new I/O manager. This release includes an LLVM code generator which, for certain code, can bring some nice performance improvements. The type checker has been overhauled. The inliner has been overhauled. Large parts of the runtime system have been overhauled. A more recent mingw is bundled on Windows.

There have been a number of significant changes since the last major release. Support for parallel execution was considerably improved. Dynamic linking is now supported on Linux. The I/O libraries are now Unicode-aware, so your Haskell programs should now handle text files containing non-ASCII characters without special effort. The package system has been made more robust by associating each installed package with a unique identifier based on its exposed ABI. There are a variety of small language changes.

Various bugfixes.

This is a bugfix release. Many bugs in the compiler, libraries, and build system have been fixed. However, most library APIs have not changed, so code that worked with 6.10.1 should continue to work with 6.10.2.