For scalar types I agree, but now that I think of it, I'm not sure it's even possible to write array code using them, unless I'm missing something. If you can't

For scalar types I agree, but now that I think of it, I'm not sure it's even possible to write array code using them, unless I'm missing something. If you can't modify the array in-place or write to a provided "output" parameter, and you can't malloc a fresh array to return (because that's a side effect), how do you write a pure function of type int[] -> int[] at all? The nice thing about Haskell is that it conceptually mallocs a fresh array to return, but then optimizes away the intermediate array in a lot of cases.