Fennel VS cosmopolitan

Compare Fennel vs cosmopolitan and see what are their differences.

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Fennel cosmopolitan
90 201
2,289 15,067
- -
9.3 9.8
6 days ago 5 days ago
Fennel C
MIT License ISC 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.

Fennel

Posts with mentions or reviews of Fennel. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-27.
  • Pluto, a Modern Lua Dialect
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Dec 2023
    Eh it's not just luajit and luajit didn't create that problem either. It's a symptom of lua actually succeeding at its design goal of being easily embedded as an extension language. A significant number of incompatible runtimes are more popular than the most recent puc lua, including I believe the older official lua 5.2 released in 2011.

    I've done a fair bit of professional lua development and I don't think I've ever written standalone up-to-date puc lua except maybe for some tooling & scripts. It's such a small language and used in such a way that the runtime, distribution method, and available APIs have much more impact on your use (and compatibility) than the version.

    Virtually everyone shipping a lua environment is also shipping changes to it that make it a unique target, if only extensions to the standard library. This is why I think syntax layer-only approach like fennel's is the correct choice for improving on lua. It mirrors lua's runtime semantics exactly, and allows you to access the implementation peculiars on their own terms and so can just be run on time of any lua system.

    https://fennel-lang.org

  • LÖVE: a framework to make 2D games in Lua
    26 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Sep 2023
    Just learned about https://fennel-lang.org/ , could have probably used that as well to avoid Lua.
  • The Bipolar Lisp Programmer
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Aug 2023
    > I’m positive that there is a Lispy language out there (actually in existence, or the aether) that is appropriate for embedded work, but the constraints of the target make it difficult to envision.

    Perhaps Fennel* fits the bill?

    * https://fennel-lang.org/

  • The Future of the Vim Project
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Aug 2023
    I've also seen neovim plugins written in fennel [0], so if you want something lispy, that's possible now.

    [0]: a Lisp that compiles to Lua, https://github.com/bakpakin/Fennel

  • Qual a linguagem que vocês mais gostam de programar?
    2 projects | /r/brdev | 26 Jun 2023
  • Can I use elixir as the scripting language of my game engine?
    1 project | /r/elixir | 6 Jun 2023
  • TimL: Clojure-like Lisp dialect that runs on and compiles down to Vimscript
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 May 2023
    Something similar: Fennel (https://fennel-lang.org/) is a lisp that compiles into Lua, which nvim can use as plugins, so you can write nvim plugins in a lisp. Aniseed (https://github.com/Olical/aniseed) makes this really easy.
  • Announcing automation-service: write and schedule home automation scripts in Lua
    3 projects | /r/haskell | 12 May 2023
    If you want a more FP language on the Lua runtime, you might be interested in Fennel. I wrote a post about adding Fennel compiler to a hslua interpreter a while back, which might be useful for you.
  • 916 Days of Emacs
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Apr 2023
  • What's your opinion on Lua programming language?
    3 projects | /r/programming | 26 Mar 2023
    There's fennel if you're a fan of LISP syntax. I like embedding lua because it's light and easy and doesn't re-engineer itself every six months like python; but I agree, the lua syntax certainly is fugly.

cosmopolitan

Posts with mentions or reviews of cosmopolitan. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-15.
  • Python Is Portable
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Apr 2024
    The reality is a bit different, the work on Python 3.6 was checked into the Cosmopolitan repo and I have been able to use it for production workloads that are in pure python. [0]

    As Cosmopolitan Libc has evolved, it has been possible to compile more software without modifications, and that includes latest Python through a project called superconfigure[1].

    Last person who tried to reproduce it from scratch did it last week (granted it too them a few days of solid work) but in the end they ended with a portable binary with Python 3.11.9, brotli, ssl and asyncio for their work related project.[2]

    [0] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/third_party...

  • Ask HN: What Underrated Open Source Project Deserves More Recognition?
    63 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Mar 2024
    Cosmopolitan https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan and https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/index.html

    Some genius realized that you can actually embed valid win32 programs inside valid posix shell scripts, and found a way to make a C cross-platform solution out of it, meaning that you can write C programs that compile to a single executable that will run on (quoting the site) Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + BIOS

    It all started from this post.

  • Cosmopolitan – build-once run-anywhere C library
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Feb 2024
  • Show HN: Usr/bin/env Docker run
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Jan 2024
    For this .args file, put one argument per line. This will run on start. You can use `/zip/mydepencency.anything` to read from files, but if you have an executable dependency you'll need to extract it first.

    You can do this with any software you can compile with comsocc, by adding a call to LoadZipArgs[1] in the main function.

    It'seasy to get started, your ideas will branch out as soon as you start playing with it.

    [1]: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/tool/args/a...

  • Libwebsockets
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jan 2024
    FWIW there is ongoing work with good progress to add websocket support to redbean (https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/pull/967)
  • Release Cosmopolitan v3.2
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jan 2024
  • Cosmopolitan v3.2
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jan 2024
  • Ask HN: ANSI escape sequences reference docs?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jan 2024
    Check out this comment by jart (cosmpolitan author) here: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/766#issuecomment...

    it might help but not sure how comprehensive it is! would it be a bad idea for you to check out the source code of other popular emulators (maybe iTerm 2^0) ?

    0: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Agnachman%2FiTerm2%20ansi&...

  • Actually Portable Vim (With a Cute Vimrc)
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Dec 2023
    The binary was compiled with Cosmopolitan Libc [0], and therefore the binary will execute natively on Linux, Mac, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and bare metal (BIOS boot).

    I would call that portable.

    [0] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

  • Show HN: PyApp – runtime installer for Python applications
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Dec 2023
    will go on my "to try" list where i already have cosmopolitan [2]. my last setup (windows) was shiv + wine + nsis (used that as pyinstaller had some issues)[2]

    [1] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/141#issuecomment...

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Fennel and cosmopolitan you can also consider the following projects:

janet - A dynamic language and bytecode vm

libc - libc targeted for embedded systems usage. Reduced set of functionality (due to embedded nature). Chosen for portability and quick bringup.

urn - Yet another Lisp variant which compiles to Lua

src - Read-only git conversion of OpenBSD's official CVS src repository. Pull requests not accepted - send diffs to the tech@ mailing list.

nvim-lspconfig - Quickstart configs for Nvim LSP

SDL - Simple Directmedia Layer

Lua-RTOS-ESP32 - Lua RTOS for ESP32

llvm-project - The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.

lua-languages - Languages that compile to Lua

luastatic - Build a standalone executable from a Lua program.

webassembly-lua - Write and compile WebAssembly code with Lua

v - Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io