Anything that comes into or goes out of a Haskell program is in IO, period. If you have an FFI function which is guaranteed to not change anything but its parameters and those only in a pure way, then you can use unsafeLocalState to "hide" the IO; but claiming that when it's not true can lead to problems ranging from incorrect results to core dumps, so don't try to lie about it.

 

Haskell String-s are *not* C strings. Not even slightly. C cannot work with Haskell's String type directly at all. Some kind of marshaling is absolutely necessary; there are functions in Foreign.Marshal.String that will marshal Haskell String-s to and from C strings.

(String is a linked list of Char, which is also not a C char; it is a constructor and a machine word large enough to hold a Unicode codepoint. And because Haskell is non-strict, any part of that linked list can be an unevaluated thunk which requires forcing the evaluation of arbitrary Haskell code elsewhere to "reify" the value; this obviously cannot be done in the middle of random C code, so it must be done during marshaling.)