# nhc98 status

The latest stable release is 1.18. The CVS development tree is now at version 1.19. Bugfixes and important changes to the system are described here for the two most recent released versions.

### nhc98 1.18 (2005-03-11) features

- New: Several more packages of hierarchical libraries are included in the build: base, parsec, haskell-src, QuickCheck, HaXml, HUnit, Cabal.
- New: FFI improvements: foreign import "dynamic" is now supported, and named C header-files are now used.
- New: The compiler now uses cpphs for Haskell source instead of cpp. This removes problems with string gaps, primes in identifiers, and so on.
- New: In hmake-interactive, if the readline library is not available, the simple line editor now has a history mechanism.
- Bugfix: hmake's processing of cpp conditional directives is improved also.
- Bugfix: Evil bugfixes for ghc versions ≥ 6.0
- Bugfix: More evil bugfixes for gcc versions ≥ 3.3
- Bugfix: A numeric pattern can now match against a Num newtype.
- Bugfix: Foreign imports and abstract newtypes now play OK together.
- Bugfix: Methods in qualified classes no longer need to be qualified in instance decls.
- Bugfix: GreenCard now accepts <<.../...>> syntax.
- Bugfix: Numerous internal tidy-ups, including fixes such that nhc98 can once again be built by hbc.

### nhc98 1.16 (2003-03-08) features

- New: A large subset of the base package of hierarchical libraries is now included in the build.
- New: The primitive FFI mechanism has been updated to match the latest official spec, and the full Foreign libraries are also included (in hierarchical form).
- Performance: The library function List.sortBy now uses a stable O(n log n) mergesort.
- Bugfix: nhc98 now works correctly in the presence of gcc-3.x.
- Bugfix: nhc98 once again builds on Cygwin with ghc.
- Bugfix: Numerous other small fixes, including revisions to the Haskell'98 standard.

### nhc98 1.14a (2002-08-13) features

- The only change between 1.14 and 1.14a is that the version of hmake included in the source package has been updated from 3.05 to 3.06.

### nhc98 1.14 (2002-06-14) features

- New: The Hat tracing system is now entirely separate from the nhc98 compiler. Hat can now be used with either ghc or nhc98 - you should download and build the Hat system after building nhc98.
- New: The compiler now supports a simplified version of ghc's package mechanism. No documentation yet, but Hat relies on it.
- Performance: Various patches for improved time/space usage of the compiler itself, contributed by Thomas Nordin.
- Bugfix: Various small fixes for OS environments like OpenBSD, ix86-Solaris, etc.

### Previous release history (nhc98)

### Release history of nhc13

### Status of various components

The basic, stable, components include the compiler itself, the Standard Prelude and Libraries, heap profiling facilities, and the tools hmake, greencard, and hp2graph. Relatively recent additions to the system are the time profiler and common FFI.

component | compiler | prelude + libraries | hierarchical libraries | GreenCard | hmake | cpphs
quality | release | release | release | release | release | beta
last change | 2005-03-09 | 2003-03-07 | 2005-03-09 | 2001 | 2005-02-27 | 2005-01-28

component | heap profiling | hp2graph | time profiling | common FFI | hi | HOOD
quality | release | release | beta | release | release
last change | 1997 | 1996 | 2001 | 2003-01-24 | 2000 | 2000

The latest updates to these pages are available on the WWW from `http://www.haskell.org/nhc98/`

This page last modified: 9th March 2005
York Functional Programming Group