c2ffi VS chibi-scheme

Quickloading :sketch or :sdl2 wants the c2ffi library which seems to be available on neither Quicklisp nor Homebrew. Downloading that library from source and following the build instructions (and several alternative variants found by Googling ) leads to errors like:

> C compiler based tool that outputs DWARF or DWARF-like debug output that actually lays out everything

That sounds like C2FFI: https://github.com/rpav/c2ffi

The only language ecosystem where I've seen it used is Common Lisp. But it emits plain JSON and depends only on LLVM (albeit a specific version thereof), and I don't see any reason why you couldn't build e.g. a Python auto-binding library on top of it.

There is the cl-autowrap that can generate lisp packages from C header filesc- I am unsure if it sticks to ANSI C or goes beyond. It inturn depends on c2ffi for the first time around.

git clone https://github.com/rpav/c2ffi git checkout -b llvm-11.0.0 refs/remotes/origin/llvm-11.0.0 cd build cmake .. # -DBUILD_CONFIG=Release LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/llvm-11/lib/ make # -j8 sudo checkinstall

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: