Fennel VS janet

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

Just learned about https://fennel-lang.org/ , could have probably used that as well to avoid Lua.

> 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/

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

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.

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.

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.

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/