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.

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).

> 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).

That is almost never an accurate way to think about it.

> I tend to think of a new language as a gigantic library sitting on top of another language

That's a bad default assumption