BuildYourOwnLisp VS janet

Build Your Own Lisp

Create your own meta-circular evaluator: https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

I don't know about C++ but there is this incredible course on C by learning to build your own Lisp. https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

I find the best way to learn technical topics is to build a simplified version of the thing. The trick is to understand the relationship between the high level components without getting lost in the details. This high level understanding then helps inform you when you drill down into specifics.

I think this book is a shining example of that philosophy: https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/. In the book, you implement an extremely bare-bones version of lisp, but it has been invaluable in my career. I found I was able to understand nuanced language features much more quickly because I have a clear model of how programming languages are decomposed into their components.

If you still want to produce a toy project in C I would suggest to build your own LISP ;-)

If you're after a lisp, MAL on Github (By kanaka) and https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/ are good.

Build your own Lisp is cool but offloads the language grammar and the parsing to the author's mpc library, this is already way overkill for what I'd like to do.

Writing a Lisp - https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

Lisps are also a good language if you want to know how languages work. They are very easy to make an interpreter for. There are good tutorials for that at https://github.com/kanaka/mal and https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/.

Anyone have any input on:

https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

It's been in my bookmarks for a long time but I've never really had time to really start it. The "who is this for" page say:

"This book is for anyone wanting to learn C, or who has once wondered how to build their own programming language.".

Well, I'm fairly competent in C (but not great) but would like to get a glimpse of what it's like to build my own language. Is it worth the time?

You might be looking for: https://janet-lang.org/

It comes with a build tool `jpm` which installs dependencies globally by default, but you can have it be installed in your project folder as well.

I like Clojure, but I never had any good opportunities to use it other than for a few small hobby projects. It is unfortunate that it is so huge with tons of dependencies and no simpler native implementation. I started looking at various LISPs and Schemes to find something lighter to use instead and ended up settling for Janet that I think is Clojure-like enough to be comfortable to use, but in a small native binary with no dependencies and can be embedded in other native programs. I am sure for big, real, projects that Clojure makes more sense, but for my hobby projects and scripts I do not think I will install it again. I am still happy for the things I learned from learning Clojure. It was a real eye-opener for an old OO-programmer.

https://janet-lang.org/

One might also check out Janet for quick scripting tasks.

https://janet-lang.org

Thanks!

I thought about another multiplatform, homoiconic, highly compact language: https://janet-lang.org/ (takes 803 kb on my machine).

It has no types though.

Racket is great, and if you like it you might find Rash interesting:

https://rash-lang.org/

Janet and Gerbil Scheme are also worth a look:

https://janet-lang.org/

https://cons.io/

Point here is that, for instance Janet language does not have cons / pair type but tuple (and so is lispoid, not lisp), but clearly this is sufficient for macros & hence seamless language construction: all you need is to be a lispoid although being a lisp gives another useful feature.

If this project interests you but is a bit more minimal than you need, the Janet language is a slightly-less but still pretty lightweight embeddable Lisp with a strong library and community: https://janet-lang.org/