= Plans for GHC 6.10 =

We expect to release GHC 6.10 around ICFP 2008.  

 *  [http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2008-September/015539.html Beta released]. 

== Things that are done already ==

 * Several '''language extensions''' advertised in the [wiki:Status/Nov07 November 2007 status report]:
   * Improvements to record syntax
   * View patterns
   * Quasiquotation
   * Generalised list comprehensions
 '''Done''': these are all in the HEAD already.

 * '''Parallel garbage collection''' (see [http://research.microsoft.com/%7Esimonpj/papers/parallel-gc/index.htm Parallel generational-copying garbage collection with a block-structured heap]).  '''Done'''.

 * '''External Core''' (output only) is working again, thanks to Tim Chevalier.

 * Better '''versioning''' to support separate compilation based on MD5 fingerprints. Already done (and documented! see [wiki:Commentary/Compiler/RecompilationAvoidance].

 * GHC now uses '''libffi''' to implement parts of the FFI, replacing some of the home-grown and very architecture-specific code we had to do this.  Amongst other benefits, this will ease the task of porting GHC in the future. Done; but ''maybe use it to solve the SE Linux paranoia problem?''

 * '''Backwards compatibility''': we've introduce "base3-compat", a backwards-compatible version of the base library
   that will provide essentially the same API as the base library that shipped with GHC 6.8.3, so that code
   depending on base-3 will continue to just work.

 * '''Haddock 2'''
    * Build it with GHC (maybe ship it with GHC too)
    * Documentation for GHC API done via Haddock 2

 * '''Extensible exceptions''', along the lines of Simon's paper [http://www.haskell.org/~simonmar/papers/ext-exceptions.pdf "An Extensible Dynamically-Typed Hierarchy of Exceptions"].  This is mainly a library change.

 * '''Haddock 2''' (see also #1964 (GHC.Prim)).  ('''Ian Lynagh''')

 * '''GHC API''' improvement: '''Thomas Schilling''' is doing a SoC project.  Preserve comments and pragmas, generic traversals (#1467, #1886, GhcApiStatus). We'll ship whatever Thomas has committed by then.

 * '''[http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Indexed_types Type families]''', fully working. ''Manuel Chakravarty and Simon PJ''

 * '''[http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell Nested data parallelism]''', in some form. ''Roman Leshchinskiy, Gabriele Keller, Manuel Chakravarty, Simon PJ''
 
  * More library reorg (#1338).  The goal here is to shift stuff out of boot-libs and into the Haskell Library Platform, which is independently upgradable.  Not hugely urgent, nice to have.

  * `^C` should raise an exception by default (also SIGPIPE, see #1619, #2301). Nearly done!  But not quite complete if you fork another process.  This latter part is lower priority.

== Things we plan to do for sure ==

  * '''Ship the Haskell Library Platform''' instead of 'extralibs'.  '''Don and Duncan''' are leading.

= Beyond 6.10 =

This is a list of things that are floating about in our minds for what to do beyond 6.10.  Nothing is decided, and these items vary wildly in their size.

 * '''[wiki:Commentary/Compiler/NewCodeGen Back-end revamp]''' (see also #1501).  '''John Dias''' is in charge.  For 6.10 we will make sure that the whole existing path still exists, so we can choose at a late date whether to rely on the new path or not.

 * '''Unicode support for text I/O'''.  This means adding Unicode encoding/decoding for Text I/O handles.   ('''Simon Marlow''': a few days work.)
   * Consensus was that Text I/O should always use the current locale encoding.  
   * You can elect to have no encoding by opening in binary mode, but that's all.

 * '''Shared libraries''', as a result of Clemens Fruhwirth's Summer of Code project.  (#1876) '''Simon Marlow''': about a week's work.
   * Binaries get much smaller
   * Compile a package on Windows to a DLL; it just works
   * C program (or Excel) that calls multiple Haskell functions gets just one copy of the RTS, rather than one per DLL as now.
   * Performance penalty, but too small to measure


 * '''Opaque interfaces''' (optionally), so you can upgrade a library without recompiling.

 * '''Parallelism'': better profiling tools.

 * '''Visual Haskell''': a Visual Studio plugin.  There is one, but it has suffered bit-rot.
 
 * '''GHC as a platform''' is the aspiration that it should be easy to plug extensions into GHC, and easy to use GHC to extend other software.

 * '''Static verification''' along the lines of Dana Xu's work.

 * '''Finish System.Process revamp''' (#2233)

 * Binary package DB, or at least make the one-file-per package work (#593, #723, #2089)