A few days ago I built the Elm compiler from source even though I barely know anything about Haskell. One machine was running Ubuntu 22.04, the other Void Linux (a rolling release distro). In both cases I only had to install the ghc and cabal-install packages, no messing around with specific versions (Void currently ships GHC 9.0.2 and Cabal 3.6.3.0).

All I had to run was:

rm worker/elm.cabal  # Might not even be needed?
cabal new-configure --ghc-option=-optl=-pthread
cabal new-build

No messing around with ghcup or anything. Am I missing something here? The binary worked fine for me when I was working through the guide. I have not done any further development because I have come to the conclusion that unfortunately Elm is not suitable for my use-case (I need seamless Javascript interoperability, but Elm does not offer that; I'm not complaining, it simply isn't what I need), but I would like to keep it as a potential option for the future.