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authorSimon Marlow <simonmar@microsoft.com>2006-04-07 02:05:11 +0000
committerSimon Marlow <simonmar@microsoft.com>2006-04-07 02:05:11 +0000
commit0065d5ab628975892cea1ec7303f968c3338cbe1 (patch)
tree8e2afe0ab48ee33cf95009809d67c9649573ef92 /ANNOUNCE
parent28a464a75e14cece5db40f2765a29348273ff2d2 (diff)
downloadhaskell-0065d5ab628975892cea1ec7303f968c3338cbe1.tar.gz
Reorganisation of the source tree
Most of the other users of the fptools build system have migrated to Cabal, and with the move to darcs we can now flatten the source tree without losing history, so here goes. The main change is that the ghc/ subdir is gone, and most of what it contained is now at the top level. The build system now makes no pretense at being multi-project, it is just the GHC build system. No doubt this will break many things, and there will be a period of instability while we fix the dependencies. A straightforward build should work, but I haven't yet fixed binary/source distributions. Changes to the Building Guide will follow, too.
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+
+ =============================================================
+ The (Interactive) Glasgow Haskell Compiler -- version 6.4
+ =============================================================
+
+The GHC Team is pleased to announce a new major release of GHC. It
+has been a long time since the last major release (Dec 2003!), and a
+lot has happened:
+
+ - GADTs (Generalised Abstract Datatypes) are supported
+
+ - STM (Software Transactional Memory) is implemented
+
+ - Full support for Cabal and a much improved package framework
+
+ - Better support for mutually-recursive modules
+
+ - A complete rewrite of the back end
+
+ - Accurate source locations in error messages
+
+ - Lots of new libraries
+
+The full release notes are here:
+
+ http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.4/html/users_guide/release-6-4.html
+
+How to get it
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+The easy way is to go to the WWW page, which should be self-explanatory:
+
+ http://www.haskell.org/ghc/
+
+We supply binary builds in the native package format for various
+flavours of Linux and BSD, and in Windows Installer (MSI) form
+for Windows folks. Binary builds for other platforms are available
+as a .tar.gz which can be installed wherever you want. The source
+distribution is also available from the same place.
+
+Packages will appear as they are built - if the package for your
+system isn't available yet, please try again later.
+
+
+
+Background
+~~~~~~~~~~
+Haskell is a standard lazy functional programming language; the
+current language version is Haskell 98, agreed in December 1998 and
+revised December 2002.
+
+GHC is a state-of-the-art programming suite for Haskell. Included is
+an optimising compiler generating good code for a variety of
+platforms, together with an interactive system for convenient, quick
+development. The distribution includes space and time profiling
+facilities, a large collection of libraries, and support for various
+language extensions, including concurrency, exceptions, and foreign
+language interfaces (C, whatever). GHC is distributed under a
+BSD-style open source license.
+
+A wide variety of Haskell related resources (tutorials, libraries,
+specifications, documentation, compilers, interpreters, references,
+contact information, links to research groups) are available from the
+Haskell home page (see below).
+
+
+On-line GHC-related resources
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+Relevant URLs on the World-Wide Web:
+
+GHC home page http://www.haskell.org/ghc/
+Haskell home page http://www.haskell.org/
+comp.lang.functional FAQ http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/faq.html
+
+
+
+System requirements
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+To compile programs with GHC, you need a machine with 64+MB memory, GCC
+and perl. This release is known to work on the following platforms:
+
+ * i386-unknown-{linux,*bsd,mingw32}
+ * sparc-sun-solaris2
+ * powerpc-apple-darwin (MacOS X)
+ * powerpc-apple-linux
+
+Ports to other platforms are possible with varying degrees of
+difficulty. The builder's guide on the web site gives a complete
+run-down of what ports work and how to go about porting to a new
+platform; it can be found at
+
+ http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/building/
+
+
+Mailing lists
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+We run mailing lists for GHC users and bug reports; to subscribe, use
+the web interfaces at
+
+ http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
+ http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-bugs
+
+There are several other haskell and ghc-related mailing lists on
+www.haskell.org; for the full list, see
+
+ http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/
+
+Please report bugs using our SourceForge page at
+
+ http://sourceforge.net/projects/ghc/
+
+or send them to glasgow-haskell-bugs@haskell.org.
+
+GHC users hang out on glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org. Bleeding
+edge CVS users party on cvs-ghc@haskell.org.
+