How did you overcome the cabal hell? Sandbox? VM? Nix? ...

Just use stack these days:

https://docs.haskellstack.org/en/stable/README/

It's easy to use and completely solves the problem. I could never use Haskell seriously until I found stack.

It may be easy to use but hard to install if you don't want to depend on binary downloads. Since I always prefer source compilation for reproducible installations on new platforms I tried to install an up-to-date Haskell platform on Debian 7 to use stack. After being stuck in the cabal hell again I tried several upgrades and downgrads of ghc just to make a cabal upgrade. Nothing worked. I couldn't even compile the built-in cabal-install of ghc. At least this should work.

Haskell is a really nice language, and I admire the work of the developers who provide GHC for free, but installation from source is really immature and painful, at least on Linux. If the Haskell platform were just self-hosting ...

That's an interesting point. I've never tried to build it directly from source. I'm not sure if this actually addresses what you want to do, but maybe you could start with the prebuilt binaries and then do `stack upgrade`, which will fetch and build the latest release from source?

I will say that I won't touch the Haskell platform with a 10 foot pole. I had nothing but issues with it in the past and it drove me away from using Haskell for years prior to finding stack.

> start with the prebuilt binaries and then do `stack upgrade`

Thanks but in this case I could also download the newest binaries instantly. The point is that I don't want to be dependent on any binaries. Compilation from scratch doesn't work.

Btw Rust has the same problem - it also depends on binary upgrades. Nim (nim-lang.org) proves how easy self-hosting can be - which also means how easy porting to other platforms can be.

I've never experienced cabal hell since stack came around.