I discovered HAMTs first when Erlang added support for first-class maps, and it was sort of a "holy shit!" moment for me. They felt like the "holy grail" of dat

I discovered HAMTs first when Erlang added support for first-class maps, and it was sort of a "holy shit!" moment for me. They felt like the "holy grail" of data structures for me; I can treat any updates as "copies" without the cost of a copy. About a year later, I learned Clojure, and fell even more in love with the data structure; when the language fully embraces a useful data structure, it changes the way you think about the entire program, and now it's sort of hard for me to go back to languages that don't have a good HAMT implementation. I mean, I still do it, but I do think that having a "go to standard" in C really has the potential to set a great precedent.