Fennel
femtolisp
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Fennel | femtolisp | |
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91 | 10 | |
2,289 | 1,550 | |
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9.3 | 0.0 | |
10 days ago | about 4 years ago | |
Fennel | Scheme | |
MIT License | BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License |
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
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Did we lose our way in making efficient software? – ~30 MB doc file vs. browser
It's interesting: minimal software is out there, but folks don't tend to choose it. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to be conservative in my dependencies, and this encourages a lightweight stack that tends to perform pretty well. These days, I'm favoring tools like Lua, SQLite, Fennel[0], Althttpd[1], Fossil[2], and the Mako Server[3] and find that great, lightweight, stable, efficient software is to be had, for free, but you have to go a bit off the beaten path. This isn't stuff you hear about on Stack Overflow.
In terms of frontend, which the post focuses on (Google Docs and a 30MB doc), I guess I'm conflicted. While I tend to favor native apps + web pages, I'm also a daily Tiddlywiki user, and I really think web apps have their place (heck, one idea I'm working on is a lightweight local server that lets you run web apps like Tiddlywiki). But without a doubt, Tiddlywiki is more resource intensive than Emacs (my go-to for notetaking when I'm not on TW). My tab for a 6MB Tiddlywiki file uses 155MB of RAM, and my (heavily customized, dozens of open buffers) Emacs session uses 88MB. So I do think the author has a good point.
[0]: https://fennel-lang.org/
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Pluto, a Modern Lua Dialect
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
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LÖVE: a framework to make 2D games in Lua
Just learned about https://fennel-lang.org/ , could have probably used that as well to avoid Lua.
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The Bipolar Lisp Programmer
> 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/
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The Future of the Vim Project
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?
- Can I use elixir as the scripting language of my game engine?
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TimL: Clojure-like Lisp dialect that runs on and compiles down to Vimscript
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.
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Announcing automation-service: write and schedule home automation scripts in Lua
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
femtolisp
- Petalisp: Elegant High Performance Computing
- fe: A tiny, embeddable language implemented in ANSI C
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From Common Lisp to Julia
> 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
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Modern Python Performance Considerations
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.
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CppCast: Julia
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
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What is the smallest x86 lisp?
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).
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lisp but small and low level?Does it make sense?
Take a look at femtolisp It has some low level features and is quite small. There is also a maintenance fork at lambdaconservatory
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Lispsyntax.jl: A Clojure-like Lisp syntax for julia
A fun Julia easter egg I recently discovered.
Running 'julia --lisp' launches a femtolisp (https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp) interpreter.
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Wisp: A light Lisp written in C++
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?
janet - A dynamic language and bytecode vm
small-lisp - A very small lisp interpreter, that I may one day get working on my 8-bit AVR microcontroller.
urn - Yet another Lisp variant which compiles to Lua
julia - The Julia Programming Language
nvim-lspconfig - Quickstart configs for Nvim LSP
Carp - A statically typed lisp, without a GC, for real-time applications.
Lua-RTOS-ESP32 - Lua RTOS for ESP32
sectorlisp - Bootstrapping LISP in a Boot Sector
lua-languages - Languages that compile to Lua
hissp - It's Python with a Lissp.
webassembly-lua - Write and compile WebAssembly code with Lua
awesome-lisp-companies - Awesome Lisp Companies