# GHC 9.8.1-alpha3 is now available

**URL:** <https://discourse.haskell.org/t/ghc-9-8-1-alpha3-is-now-available/7399>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [August 24, 2023, 1:31am UTC](https://discourse.haskell.org/t/ghc-9-8-1-alpha3-is-now-available/7399 "2023-08-24T01:31:01Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![bgamari](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/discourse.haskell.org/bgamari/32/3599_2.png) [@bgamari](https://discourse.haskell.org/u/bgamari)\
**Post date:** [August 24, 2023, 1:31am UTC](https://discourse.haskell.org/t/ghc-9-8-1-alpha3-is-now-available/7399/1 "2023-08-24T01:31:01Z")

</div>

The GHC developers are very pleased to announce the availability of the  
third alpha prerelease of GHC 9.8.1. Binary distributions, source  
distributions, and documentation are available at [downloads.haskell.org](https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.8.1-alpha3).

GHC 9.8 will bring a number of new features and improvements, including:

- Preliminary support the [`TypeAbstractions` language extension](https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0425-decl-invis-binders.rst),  
allowing types to be bound in type declarations.

- Support for the [`ExtendedLiterals` extension](https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0451-sized-literals.rst), providing  
more consistent support for non-word-sized numeric literals in the surface  
language

- Improved rewrite rule matching behavior, allowing limited matching of  
higher-order patterns

- Better support for user-defined warnings by way of the [`WARNING`  
pragma](https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0541-warning-pragmas-with-categories.rst)

- The introduction of the new [`GHC.TypeError.Unsatisfiable`](https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0433-unsatisfiable.rst)  
constraint, allowing more predictable user-defined type errors

- Implementation of the [export deprecation proposal](https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0134-deprecating-exports-proposal.rst),  
allowing module exports to be marked with `DEPRECATE` pragmas

- The addition of [build semaphore support](https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0540-jsem.rst) for parallel compilation,  
allowing better use of parallelism across GHC builds

- More efficient representation of info table provenance information,  
reducing binary sizes by nearly 80% in some cases when  
`-finfo-table-map` is in use

A full accounting of changes can be found in the [release notes](https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.8.1-alpha3/docs/users_guide/9.8.1-notes.html). This alpha  
includes roughly a dozen changes relative to alpha 2, including what we believe  
should be nearly the last changes to GHC’s boot libraries.

We would like to thank GitHub, IOG, the Zw3rk stake pool,  
Well-Typed, Tweag I/O, Serokell, Equinix, SimSpace, the Haskell  
Foundation, and other anonymous contributors whose on-going financial  
and in-kind support has facilitated GHC maintenance and release  
management over the years. Finally, this release would not have been  
possible without the hundreds of open-source contributors whose work  
comprise this release.

As always, do give this release a try and open a [ticket](https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/new) if you see  
anything amiss.