I’m in favor of more minor releases and less major releases, so that there are less GHC branches to maintain and the ones that are there will have a longer shelf life, allowing for more backports (not just of bugfixes, but also performance improvements and other things).
At the moment, I can barely update my own code bases to 9.6.x (lots of small problems)… and GHC HQ is already in the process of pushing out 9.10. I don’t see how I can keep this up, honestly. GHCup still recommends 9.4.8, but it’s effectively already abandoned by GHC HQ: GHC Status · Wiki · Glasgow Haskell Compiler / GHC · GitLab
Other alternatives were discussed previously, but I don’t remember all the arguments against it… I don’t have a lot of visibility on the pain points and cost centers of GHC maintenance:
- GHC LTS releases (long-running branches)
- rust model: very conservative stable releases, fast iterating nightlies (this might effectively be like maintaining two compilers)
- language editions (so that I can opt out of all breaking changes, even with newer compilers)
So I won’t put forward an opinion on whether any of those are feasible.