Arc is desinged as a practical language, and as such it is not built on any pure primitives. PG had, at one point, taken such an approach, but abandoned it because of poor performance.
It calls many mzscheme functions to run, most of them not primitive. Primitives, as far as they exist, are defined in ac.scm. They are not simple, however- Instead, the emphasis is on keeping the language implementation simple and reasonably efficient.
> Arc is desinged as a practical language, and as such it is not built on any pure primitives. PG had, at one point, taken such an approach, but abandoned it because of poor performance.
Personally I'm retaking this approach, and doing some trickery on the scheme side to improve performance. So far what I've been doing is only slightly slower than Anarki (within sampling variation, although the average times are slightly higher).
