Yeah, I like the way you handle the-deck and the-piles. And I like this style of programming in general (i.e. a few global variables to keep state, functions corresponding to verbs in the problem space that manipulate the globals in an intuitive way). You've reminded me of how preventing all side effects could get awkward by ruling out this style of programming entirely.
To clarify, I'm not mostly interested in eliminating side effects because of some obsession with purity, but rather for performance sake. I've been pursuing so many lang design choices like fexprs/first-class macros that are supposed to really cripple performance, that I'm starting to worry my hobby implementations aren't even going to run. I'd heard that Haskell and Clojure get a big performance boost from enforced immutability/no side effects because it guarantees that most operations can safely be run concurrently, so I've just considered it an option.
I'm a real novice when it comes to optimization, and I'm certainly interested in techniques that could help me get decent performance without having to sacrifice mutability. TCO, strategic memoization, compiler hints? Any tips on this front could be really useful to me.
