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