Agreed. > It's akin to compiling a simple c program with loops unrolled and fully static variables Yes, and optimizing compilers take this to an extreme. It t

Agreed. > It's akin to compiling a simple c program with loops unrolled and fully static variables Yes, and optimizing compilers take this to an extreme. It turns out that "computing" a factorial only requires my runtime language to have `mov` and `ret` instructions: https://godbolt.org/z/3Y6bGcsba https://godbolt.org/z/3Y6bGcsba