Fennel VS urn

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/

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 many different languages that can compile to Lua: - TypeScript is probably the most well-known and most compatible language for Lua. The TypeScriptToLua compiler lets you compile TypeScript code into Lua with a mostly 1:1 conversion. You can use the @jackmacwindows/craftos-types and @jackmacwindows/cc-types NPM packages to add typing declarations for CraftOS APIs and modules. Alternatively, use my template repo for a more ready-to-go setup. - Haxe was built with compilation to Lua in mind, and so you can write code for it and have it run just fine in CC. There's some declarations for it available online, and I also have my own typing set for it (which I should really upload somewhere - DM me if you want it for now). - C# can also compile to Lua, but it's a bit tough to get working right in CC, as it has a huge default library and abuses the global table in a way that CC has trouble with. However, it's possible to use, and I've gotten it working in the past (unfortunately, I don't know how anymore). - Urn is a Lisp dialect that was built by two CC devs and was designed to run in CC. However, I wouldn't recommend it unless you're good with functional programming.

Also, if the microcontroller you're working with is an ESP32 chip, you may be able to use use one of the lisp-to-Lua transpiled languages (urn or fennel) with something like Lua RTOS or NodeMCU. Not entirely sure how well this works in practice, but in theory it should be possible. Of the two, Fennel's probably more likely to behave well when used like this because it's more like a thin translation layer on top of Lua, but Urn's probably going to feel more comfortable to use because it feels like this weird mix of CL and Racket design.

Urn Lisp, A Lisp implementation on top of Lua: https://urn-lang.com

I don't know how much of reloading you need. I did something like that many moons ago. See here: https://github.com/SquidDev/urn/issues/12

Clone Urn: wget run https://gist.githubusercontent.com/SquidDev/e0f82765bfdefd48b0b15a5c06c0603b/raw/clone.lua https://github.com/SquidDev/urn.git (or similar)