Announcing jhc 0.7.4! There have been a few major changes, the main one being
that there is now support for a garbage collector. This drastically increases
the number of programs which are feasable to compile with jhc.

  http://repetae.net/computer/jhc/

Any testing people can do with -fjgc would be greatly appreciated! My gameplan
is to fix any issues that come up with the new gc and release a 0.7.5 that
will have the GC enabled by default. This will probably be the first version
of jhc I can recommend to non-developers with a good concience :). Once that is
done I can implement a good strategy for library compatibility with other
compilers and the standards. As it is, jhc has a mix of haskell 98 and haskell
2010 and the ghc base as its distributed libraries, basically whatever I found I
needed in practice I added as I went along. This won't work in the long run.

Major changes

 * a garbage colletor which can be enabled with '-fjgc' is available.
   after some more testing, I will make it the default in the 0.7.5 release.
 * A new memory allocator based on Jeff Bonwick's slab memory allocator for
   kernels. This means that in many cases, memory can be pulled off a slab
   and immediately used with no initialization, in addition, it allowed a
   rearrangement of the GC meta-data to optimizally use the cache.
 * packed representation of algebraic types, 'Maybe Foo' is actually
   represented in memory as a NULL pointer or just a 'Foo' with no tag bits.
   Combined with the slab allocator, this can double the number of some common
   values that can be put in a cache line.
 * some intense profiling of generated code and modification of the rts and
   code generator. Signifigant speed-ups in compiled programs are the result.

Some other changes since 0.7.3 are
 * documentation updates, especially when it comes to the runtime.
 * ghc 6.12 support (it is in fact required now.)
 * no more monolithic 'Main'. the core pass moved to E.Main and the grin pass
   moved to Grin.Main.
 * generated C code is more compact and easier to debug.
 * more use of bytestring internally, improved performance
 * JHC_RTS_INCLUDE flag allows including the rts from an
   external file. useful for debugging/developing the RTS.
 * explicit register support in grin, for alternate back ends such as a NCG
 * Removed all compiler magic dealing with Eq,Bounded,Ord, and Bits. instances
   for these are specified in haskell code even for built in types now.
 * cleaned out some obsolete flags and options on command line.
 * updated applicative and support for newest version of 'containers' library.
 * bug updates
 * various bug fixes