This is likely caused by an old GHC bug that interacts poorly with newer version of binutils (I can't remember the exact bug, unfortunately).

I personally use hvr's Ubuntu PPA [1] whenever installing GHC on Ubuntu. This PPA backports patches to old versions of GHC to keep them working with newer versions of binutils, and I can confirm that the version of GHC 7.10.2 offered from here works well with Ubuntu 18.04.

Ryan S.

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[1] https://launchpad.net/~hvr/+archive/ubuntu/ghc