The GHC community update consists of three sections:
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Call for contributions: The GHC team asks for contributions - these range from issues that are simple and fun to solve to issues that require an expert pair of eyes that we have too few of.
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Call for opinions: The GHC team asks for your opinion on some matter regarding GHC - these are issues about often contentious matters where community input is highly valued. We ask that you engage in good faith.
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Maintainers’ section: To avoid surprises in upcoming GHC releases, we try to inform maintainers of Haskell libraries as early as possible to make sure they can test their libraries against unreleased GHC versions. This section is also relevant for industry users looking to adapt their codebases to newly released GHC versions.
Call for contributions
- Searching for volunteers for reinstallable-base work: We are looking for contributors to the ongoing efforts on reinstallable base - @TeofilC has been doing a lot of work in that area, please contact him or comment under respective issues on the linked issue tracker.
- Documentation issues: if you are a newcomer in GHC development but konw your way around as a user, these might be interesting first issues to tackle - more can be found at the GHC issue tracker
- Add hints for TH level errors: The new level errors sometimes have unfortunate ergonomics - if you are a template-haskell user with good intuitition of these error messages, we would be happy about you adding hints to these error messages
- Add hints when certain wired-in type classes cannot be solved for:
- There are also a lot of issues wrt. improving error messages which are always a great improvement to the compiler - more can always be found on the issue tracker, filtered by newcomer
Call for opinions
- Deprecate the mark region GC #26802: @TerrorJack is looking into the deprecation of this rarely used, untested and unmaintained GC.
- Survey of developer experience: we are still surveying GHC users and developers with regards to their developer experience building and developing the GHC.
- Reinstallable base - Develop better handling of wired-in names: To be able to move more items from
ghc-internaltobase, we need better handling of GHC’s “wired-in” items.
Maintainers’ section
- GHC proposal 732, “simplify static forms”, has been implemented: If you are a user of static pointers, this might be a relevant change for you.
- We expect that GHC 9.12.4 will be have a release candidate this week to fix a critical runtime incorrectness bug in 9.12.3. As a reminder, please don’t update your compiler to 9.12.3.
- Bugfix release priorities surrounding 9.12.4 (#26975)