If you haven't already, go file a bug on https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues Edward Excerpts from cheater00 .'s message of 2014-08-06 15:18:04 +0100:
Hi, I have just spent some time trying to figure out why all of a sudden "cabal repl" silently exits without an error message. What helped was to take a project that could launch the repl and compare the cabal files to my new project. It turns out the exposed-modules entry was missing. I was wondering whether this behaviour was intentional, as I don't recollect this happening before, but I don't have older systems to test this on.
The reason I wanted to run a repl without editing exposed modules was to test some dependencies I pulled in to the sandbox with cabal install. The package in question didn't have any code of its own yet. In this case I would just expect ghci to load with the Prelude.
Thanks!