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Thanks for pointing that out. I'm not a language or compiler engineer so my sight wasn't big enough. I tend to think of a new language as a gigantic library sit

Thanks for pointing that out. I'm not a language or compiler engineer so my sight wasn't big enough. I tend to think of a new language as a gigantic library sitting on top of another language, and just assumed that if the base language can't handle something like a persistent data structure, then the new language would struggle with that as well.

kazagistar 11y ago
That is almost never an accurate way to think about it.
dkersten 11y ago
Only a very small handful of languages are actually implemented like this. Its worth also pointing out that some languages that compile to C, still support features that C does not (for example, Chicken Scheme compiles to C and supports both garbage collection and continuations, neither of which C supports natively).
- masklinn 11y ago
  > for example, Chicken Scheme compiles to C and supports both garbage collection and continuations, neither of which C supports natively And GHC still allows compiling Haskell (lazy, functional, garbage-collected) via C (eager, procedural, manually managed).
autoreleasepool 11y ago
> I tend to think of a new language as a gigantic library sitting on top of another language That's a bad default assumption