Unless you count the ability to do imports from around the web. But you can still make it side-effect-less by using caching and semantinc hashes on those imports?
these are side-effects performed by the compiler's runtime in a sandboxed environment. Dhall scripts are unable to perform side-effects on their own. This is a completely different setting compared to unrestricted side-effects available within a script written in general-purpose language.
I heard you liked configuration languages, so I wrote a configuration language for your configuration language.
How long before you stick a Yaml config into your Go configuration library for easier maintenance? And so the cycle continues.