c-mera VS chibi-scheme

Arguably Pacman Clone - it uses WISP (non s-exps syntax for any lisp) + C-Mera which is some kind of mix of C and CL, and is written mostly in CL.

c-mera does exist.

Thanks, you're right. I chose JS because it is so well-known, but I think it does have some other advantages as well. For example, if you need to run a lot of compatibility test commands, or need to generate code via external programs, or even make network requests to get config values or something, you can do all of that in parallel with JS async instead of sequentially like configure. You might find https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera interesting. It's similar to this project but uses Lisp and a unified syntax.

I used https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera for this purpose and it worked very well.

That's a Lisp preprocessor for a non-Lisp language.

If you program in C using the Common Lisp c-mera preprocessor, or any of the other similar systems, it's the same thing.

You're writing everything in S-exps, and the expansions use conses, but the output is C; so that of course cannot call cons at run time.

https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera

even more interesting are the handful of projects layering lisp style macros on top of C. i've seen several go by over the years; a quick google search brought up c-mera and cmacro.

If you look for lisp-like syntax in C: - cmera https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera

Your core point is absolutely true about how Lisp is special in that it usually provides a read procedure to turn a textual type into a native object that can be evaluated (this is a side effect of homoiconicity, so any homoiconic language will have this property too), but I have one additional nitpick to make ontop of yours:

> [...] eval can take any lisp object and evaluate it.

eval cannot be generalized to accepting any Lisp object, only specifically symbolic expressions (symbols, or lists (potentially nested) of symbols). I discovered this because I thought Chibi Scheme was throwing a warning for valid code[0] to inject a value into an expression for eval, but Marc helped me understand that the warning was correct, because Scheme only specifies what eval does for symbolic values.

[0] https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme/issues/902

I think a VM for a small, but highly abstract, language like Scheme might address the objections of the author(s) of this article. You might like Chibi-Scheme: https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme

Having said that, IMO, if you're having fun with uxn and its retro 8-bit aesthetic, by all means keep going with that.

I would also add [chibi scheme](https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme) to the C-embedded alternatives.

This one? https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme I notice it's intended to be embedded in C, so it's not a perfect match.

Chibi-Scheme's definition is interesting: