TL;DR: the latest version of inline-c,
0.6.0.0, does not
require manual specification of generated C files. Moreover, ghci now
works, provided you use -fobject-code. The build process as a whole is
much more reliable.
GHC 8.2.1 just came out, and it contains a new template Haskell function
that I added specifically to make inline-c more of a first-class
citizen:
addForeignFile.
This function lets you emit bits of foreign code that will be linked with the object code for the current module.
The new inline-c now uses this function, which means that compiling
Haskell code with inline C expressions will “just work”, without
compiling the generated C files explicitly or without specifying the
generated C files in the cabal file.
You can also use ghci as you would normally, provided that you pass
-fobject-code to it. We reccomend using ghci -fobject-code -O0 for
speed. -fobject-code is needed because addDependentFile does not
work when loading a module in interpreted mode. I plan to fix this in
the near future, and after that happens I’ll probably consider
inline-c “done”, since it’s working out very well for the projects
that use it with no API change since the first release.