Setting Up GHC 8.6.5 and Cabal on aarch64 platforms (Manjaro Arm, Raspberry Pi4, Pinebook, Pinebook Pro)

There are more and more ARM64 bits hardware around, aarch64 is getting a thing. Thanks to Manjaro Arm project, it is easier to setup a light weight system for day to day use.

I have a Raspberry Pi 4 installed with Manjaro ARM. Compared to Raspbian, the performance increase is quite visible. But what is missing is the Haskell eco-system.

Here is what I figured out to get GHC 8.6.5 and Cabal running in Manjaro ARM.

1. Setup a swap with at least 4GB.
2. Download the prebuild GHC 8.6.5 binaries

• ghc-8.6.5-1-aarch64.pkg.tar.xz
• ghc-libs-8.6.5-1-aarch64.pkg.tar.xz
• ghc-static-8.6.5-1-aarch64.pkg.tar.xz

 from here
3. Extract the three tar files in / (it will be extracted to /usr/ automatically.
4. Install LLVM
5. Download cabal-install 3.0.0.0 from here.
6. Extract cabal-install 3.0.0.0 and run

./bootstrap

Go and make a cup of coffee or probably take a nap. It took 4-5 hours on my Pi4 with 4GB RAM.
7. When it is built, you should find the binary in

~/.cabal/bin/

8. Setup up cabal via

cabal update

9. It is better to re-install the official binary and override the bootstrapped binary via

cabal install cabal-install --overwrite-policy=always

10 It will take another 2-3 hours.