Given the program:

import Data.List
main = print $ maximumBy compare [1..10000]

Compiling with -O2, on GHC 7.8.3 this runs in constant stack space (works fine with +RTS -K1K). With GHC 7.10.2 I get:

$ ghc --make Test.hs -O2 -rtsopts
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( Test.hs, Test.o )
Linking Test.exe ...

$ Test +RTS -K100K
Stack space overflow: current size 33680 bytes.
Use `+RTS -Ksize -RTS' to increase it.

Not sure why it's failing at 33K instead of 100K, but it's certainly taking more than 1K as GHC 7.8.3 did.

See #3416 (closed) for previous discussion of this issue. My guess is that in older versions of GHC the strictness analysis managed to kick in and optimise things. With the burnt bridges that no longer works.