Here is a bit of history which might shed some light on the decision.

First and very partial implementation - JavaScript. It was a prototype which I knew I will be throwing away... and I did.

Second attempt, also very partial - Lisp. I used SBCL. Skipping the details here but the result was as follows: got stuck with two different unrelated issues. I did not know would I be stuck with additional issues even if I somehow solve these two.

Third attempt - found a language in which I will never be stuck unable to solve something. C. Also, looked around: bash, Python, Ruby - they are all C. At the time I thought I might be "borrowing" some code from. It didn't happen. I did look though.

Edit: unexpectedly a huge chunk of work, which is garbage collection, was already done for me. C has garbage collection! It is a library - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boehm_garbage_collector