[throwaway894345]

This is the relevant passage:

> Nickel permits side-effects, but they are heavily constrained: they must be commutative, a property which makes them not hurting parallelizability. They are extensible, meaning that third-party may define new effects and implement externally the associated effect handlers in order to customize Nickel for specific use-cases.

This answers your question about why Nickel is preferable to general purpose programming languages--the side-effects are more limited. Further, it reads to me like the "side-effects" are something that the owner of the runtime opts into by extending the sandbox with callables that can do side-effects as opposed to untrusted code being able to perform side-effects in any Nickel sandbox.