Carp VS femtolisp

Compare Carp vs femtolisp and see what are their differences.

Carp

A statically typed lisp, without a GC, for real-time applications. (by carp-lang)

femtolisp

a lightweight, robust, scheme-like lisp implementation (by JeffBezanson)
Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
Carp femtolisp
84 10
5,393 1,534
0.2% -
0.7 0.0
about 1 year ago about 4 years ago
Haskell Scheme
Apache License 2.0 BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Carp

Posts with mentions or reviews of Carp. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-11.

femtolisp

Posts with mentions or reviews of femtolisp. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-09.
  • Petalisp: Elegant High Performance Computing
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jul 2023
  • fe: A tiny, embeddable language implemented in ANSI C
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jun 2023
  • From Common Lisp to Julia
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Sep 2022
    > In short, Julia is very similar to Common Lisp, but brings a lot of extra niceties to the table

    This probably because Jeff Bezanson, the creator of Julia, created a Lisp prior to Julia, which I think still exists inside Julia in some fashion

    https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp

  • Modern Python Performance Considerations
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 May 2022
    Well let's flip this around: do you think you could write a performant minimal Python in a weekend? Scheme is a very simple and elegant idea. Its power derives from the fact that smart people went to considerable pains to distill computation to limited set of things. "Complete" (i.e. rXrs) schemes build quite a lot of themselves... in scheme, from a pretty tiny core. I suspect Jeff Bezanson spent more than a weekend writing femtolisp, but that isn't really important. He's one guy who wrote a pretty darned performant lisp that does useful computation as a passion project. Check out his readme; it's fascinating: https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp

    You simply can't say these things about Python (and I generally like Python!). It's truer for PyPy, but PyPy is pretty big and complex itself. Take a look at the source for the scheme or scheme-derived language of your choice sometime. I can't claim to be an expert in any of what's going on in there, but I think you'll be surprised how far down those parens go.

    The claim I was responding to asserted that lisps and smalltalks can only be fast because of complex JIT compiling. That is trueish in practice for Smalltalk and certainly modern Javascript... but it simply isn't true for every lisp. Certainly JIT-ed lisps can be extremely fast, but it's not the only path to a performant lisp. In these benchmarks you'll see a diversity of approaches even among the top performers: https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/

    Given how many performant implementations of Scheme there are, I just don't think you can claim it's because of complex implementations by well-resourced groups. To me, I think the logical conclusion is that Scheme (and other lisps for the most part) are intrinsically pretty optimizable compared to Python. If we look at Common Lisp, there are also multiple performant implementations, some approximately competitive with Java which has had enormous resources poured into making it performant.

  • CppCast: Julia
    2 projects | /r/cpp | 31 Mar 2022
    While it uses an Algol inspired syntax, it has the same approach to OOP programing as CLOS(Common Lisp Object System), with multi-methods and protocols, it has a quite powerfull macro system like Lisp, similar REPL experience, and underneath it is powerered by femtolisp.
  • Julia and the Incarceration of Lisp
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jul 2021
  • What is the smallest x86 lisp?
    5 projects | /r/lisp | 25 Jun 2021
    For a real answer, other replies have already mentioned KiloLisp, but there's also femtolisp. Also, not exactly what you're asking for, but Maru is a very compact and elegant self-hosting lisp (compiles to x86).
  • lisp but small and low level?Does it make sense?
    4 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 24 Mar 2021
    Take a look at femtolisp It has some low level features and is quite small. There is also a maintenance fork at lambdaconservatory
  • Lispsyntax.jl: A Clojure-like Lisp syntax for julia
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jan 2021
    A fun Julia easter egg I recently discovered.

    Running 'julia --lisp' launches a femtolisp (https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp) interpreter.

  • Wisp: A light Lisp written in C++
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Dec 2020
    Reminds me of the femtolisp README :)

    Almost everybody has their own lisp implementation. Some programmers' dogs and cats probably have their own lisp implementations as well. This is great, but too often I see people omit some of the obscure but critical features that make lisp uniquely wonderful. These include read macros like #. and backreferences, gensyms, and properly escaped symbol names. If you're going to waste everybody's time with yet another lisp, at least do it right damnit.

    https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Carp and femtolisp you can also consider the following projects:

small-lisp - A very small lisp interpreter, that I may one day get working on my 8-bit AVR microcontroller.

julia - The Julia Programming Language

awesome-lisp-companies - Awesome Lisp Companies

sectorlisp - Bootstrapping LISP in a Boot Sector

ferret - Ferret is a free software lisp implementation for real time embedded control systems.

Fennel - Lua Lisp Language

hy - A dialect of Lisp that's embedded in Python

babashka - Native, fast starting Clojure interpreter for scripting

mirage - MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels

nim-esp8266-sdk - Nim wrapper for the ESP8266 NON-OS SDK