Haskell: GHC LTS Releases

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GHC LTS Releases

Andreas Klebinger - 2025-07-07

GHC will start maintaining an LTS release/branch in the near future

A release being designated LTS (Long Term Support) in this case means we plan to support it over a longer timeframe than usual.

Concretely the plan is to provide updates for a LTS releases for at least two years. Most likely we will support LTS releases for even longer than that, aiming for a support window of three years currently.

During this time we will be providing minor releases fixing bugs as with any other release. The main difference being that we will do so for a longer period of time.

There are no plans to backport any new features to LTS releases after their initial release.

In terms of frequency of LTS releases we plan to have an overlap between LTS support windows of different LTS series of six months.

A potential timeline might then look like this:

2025 Aug    - LTS 9.14 released
2028 Spring - LTS 9.22 released
2028 Summer - LTS 9.14.X - last 9.14 point release
2031 Spring  - LTS 9.X released
2031 Summer - Last 9.22 point release
...

Non-LTS releases

GHC will continue to release new major non-lts releases on a ~6 Month cadence. We expect to cut back on the lifetime of these releases slightly, dedicating the resources freed up this way to enable a longer support window for the LTS releases.

Why LTS releases?

In practice some releases always saw more adoption than others by users. The GHC Team has not been blind to this fact and has at times informally extended the life of a certain release based on this as well.

This resulted in a sort of informal “post-hoc LTS” status of releases. At times with support windows not much shorter than our proposed minimum of two years.<...

Get the full details here: GHC LTS Releases — The Glasgow Haskell Compiler