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.