femtolisp VS lume

> 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

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.

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.

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).

Take a look at femtolisp It has some low level features and is quite small. There is also a maintenance fork at lambdaconservatory

A fun Julia easter egg I recently discovered.

Running 'julia --lisp' launches a femtolisp (https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp) interpreter.

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

Lua is a small language and its "standard library" is very minimal. Lua's intended for embedding so usually the host program provides a broader standard library by exposing functions to lua. However, there are several standard library packages for lua: batteries and lume are focused on gamedev; Penlight aims at bringing the breadth of python's stdlib to lua; plenary.nvim for nvim plugins; and probably more for other domains. I'd definitely recommend checking these out to help get closer to functionality level of most other languages (I use both lume and batteries, but dropped penlight awhile back because I found some implementations confusing/overcomplicated/inconsistent).

Making a lua-based distro might benefit from packing in an existing lua utility library instead of starting your own: lume (useful single file of utilities) or batteries (organized into modules).

Second, hot reload actually works and is usually instant. (lume has one you can adapt, I use gabe's class system and reload since it's already integrated). Since an instance of an object is a table, and functions on the object are elements in a table, you can swap out functions for their new values and keep your current state. By comparison, Unity's C# hot code reloading requires you to serialize your state because it needs to unload the AppDomain. It needs to rebuild the world with the new types. Most serialization occurs automatically, but often it doesn't and you need to add special callbacks to make it work. Regardless, for projects of any real size, it's slow. Not sure how Unreal's Live++ (Live Coding) works, but seems like you can't edit .h files.

From lume:

Or check out Lume.

Yeah, lume is not a tiny library, but you can simply take only the functions you need from it. It's source code is very easy to read and (de)serialization implemented there in pretty minimalistic way.

I'm not very familiar with javascript and its spreading operator, but it seems to me that something similar is in lume. Check out lume.extend and lume.merge.