This isn't portable with glibc. (It isn't for C/C++ programs, either).

You can build GHC with musl libc and then make truly portable static binaries but it isn't that easy.

https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/37m7q7/ghc_musl_ea...

You can't link glibc statically for technical reasons. In some sense, this is the only problem I had. If there was a way to use an alternate libc, it would probably eliminate this issue entirely.

I know there was some work to do a musl and or alpine Linux build. Or both, probably easy to google. Also I'm moderately certain that ghc on FreeBSD and Mac don't need glibc ;)

Already built for alpine linux, and I have it setup to use a stage 2 bootstrap. So you build off debian, then build locally to build an alpine apk.

https://github.com/mitchty/alpine-linux-ghc-bootstrap

Recently updated last week to 8.0.1, and its submitted upstream but not yet accepted because alpine linux 3.4 is about to come out.

If you want to try it now you can docker pull mitchty/alpine-ghc:8.0

Targeting musl works out of the box with the musl toolchain and once you have a musl build you can build another ghc with that one with musl as the host.

I haven't tried building a statically linked musl ghc, and I honestly don't know how, but it'd be great to figure out. Any pointers? Speaking of static musl builds, that can be a good choice to create a single bindist of GHC that works on CentOS, Debian, Alpine, and any other Linux distro. Seeing how Docker defaults to Alpine images, it could be beneficial in that regard as well.