That's a bet I would take any day and I think you probably don't need the low level access you think you do. It's largely due to historical architectural decisions that people think so.
Atom is a Haskell DSL for designing hard real-time embedded software. At Eaton, we use it for automotive control systems. Based on guarded atomic actions, and similar to software transactional memory, Atom enables highly concurrent programming without the need for mutex locking. In addition, Atom performs compile-time task scheduling and generates code with deterministic execution time and constant memory use, simplifying the process of timing verification and memory consumption in hard realtime applications. Without mutex locking and run-time task scheduling, Atom can eliminate the need and overhead of RTOSs for many embedded applications.
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See: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=359579
Also, you might be interested in this: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/atom
If you care at all about security, then formal verification afforded by FP techniques should also interest you.