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I thought that the purpose of GC in WASM was to allow such higher level languages to be placed there without a bulky runtime also in WASM.

What's the value proposition of WASM GC if not this?

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As I understand it, WASM GC provides a number of low level primitives that are managed by the WASM host runtime, which would theoretically allow languages like Go or Python to slim down how much of their own language runtime needs to be packaged into the WASM module.

But how those languages still need to carry around some runtime of their own, and I don't think it's obvious how much a given language will benefit.

>But how those languages still need to carry around some runtime of their own

Also just there will be a special version of those language runtimes which probably won't be supported in 10 years time. Just like a lot of languages no longer have up to date versions that can run on the common language runtime.

Programming languages with type erasure would have no runtime, just raw program code and the WASM GC. Languages that have runtime types still need a runtime for that functionality.

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