ferret VS fe

Seems like there has been no development since 2020 - https://github.com/nakkaya/ferret

The whole of ferret's source code is in a single org-mode file, following the literate programming style: https://github.com/nakkaya/ferret/blob/master/ferret.org

fyi there's some middle ground via ferret if you want to mix the two in the future. I think janet lang is more full featured, borrowing ideas from clojure while targeting simple embedding alongside c.

Another commenter already mentioned Gambit Scheme. That provides for inline C and therefore very easy interop with external libraries. It still has a runtime and GC though - those might pose a problem depending on your platform and task.

Ferret (https://github.com/nakkaya/ferret) and Carp (https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp) are both Lisp-like low level languages. Both seem to be fairly experimental in nature though.

> anything but C

Taking you literally, Rust and D can both compile for bare metal. D in particular has a "Better C" subset. (https://dlang.org/spec/betterc.html)

In the same vein, Terra is a C like language (manual memory management) that you metaprogram with Lua. (https://github.com/terralang/terra)

Taking you very literally, Forth is also an option.

Impressive. Wonder how the performance in Emacs will be with a file this big... org source file

This is incredible. I'll be tinkering with this for a while, guaranteed. As the advantages of combining Lisp and Forth in this way are slowly revealed to me it's like unlocking parts of my brain to interact with each other that never have done before.

Pretentiousness on my part aside, this is a pretty mind-blowing concept. The interpreter being in less than 1000 lines of (comprehensible) C is all the more commendable (most of these minimal languages turn out to be some monolithic Rust thing or similar, which kinda defeats the entire purpose imo).

Excited to take a closer look at the source to see how the various data structures etc. are laid out in memory. I won't be able to resist making comparisons to my current/other favourite mini-language 'fe' (https://github.com/rxi/fe), a sub-1000-line Lisp also written in C. If you haven't seen that one I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Thank you for putting this online. Happy hacking!

- Simple and easy to use C API

[1] https://github.com/rxi/fe/blob/master/doc/impl.md

Very cool! Quite similar to fe [1], a tiny, embeddable Lisp by the magnificent rxi. Seriously, if you like games and gorgeous C and Lua code, check out his projects and the games on itch.io!

[1] https://github.com/rxi/fe