Though, first, as a random aside it turns out they do not yet have exhaustive tests for their stdlib. As shown by an update making a stdlib function reliably error: https://github.com/tweag/nickel/issues/987
That realization has let me write a foldl that has a call stack depth of 2, rather than O(n), which honestly has solved the performance issues for half the days so far
https://github.com/euank/advent-of-nickel-2022/blob/dc003f7c/lib.ncl#L43-L48
Unfortunately, just having a faster foldl has not been enough to make day11 complete.
At this point, my day11 solution uses all my ram (64 gigs) for something like 25 "rounds", and part2 requires 10k rounds. I feel like this really might be the point where I have to start improving the interpreter itself since that memory usage is just ridiculous.
I'm going to try and get it to work without interpreter changes a bit more since I do have some ideas to try still...