Gotcha. I certainly agree (albeit with low confidence - never sure what someone somewhere has done) that would make no sense as a GHC target. But that doesn't mean the concepts necessarily have no applicability. As I said, I've found myself wishing for some of Haskell's capabilities while writing C. That said, when the usefulness is subtle it's probably not the place to start. I'd dig deeper into some of the other monads first and basically forget about IO until you actually want to code in Haskell.

Incidentally, you can write Haskell to write your embedded C: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/atom

I haven't actually played with it, but understand it's used in production.