scheme-for-max VS Fennel

Mine is Scheme for Max, now on it's fourth open source release, but really written so I could make computer music how I want to. It's an extension to the popular Max/MSP visual music programming environment that embeds an s7 Scheme interpreter and provides a substantial API/FFI to Max. It allows you to script Max (and thus also Ableton Live) with Scheme, enabling interactive coding, algorithmic music, live coding, macros, and just much more pleasant scripting than in JavaScript. It locks in with the scheduler so you can even use Scheme powered sequencers within Ableton Live alongside regular Live tracks, and you can build sophisticated Live control surfaces using the Live API.

Github page here: https://github.com/iainctduncan/scheme-for-max

The project page is here, with links to lots of documentation I've done: https://github.com/iainctduncan/scheme-for-max

To download Scheme for Max and for tutorials, documentation, and the cookbook, visit the GitHub page: https://github.com/iainctduncan/scheme-for-max

If you like things like Janet, you might also like s7 Scheme. It is also a minimal Scheme built entirely in C and dead easy to embed. I used it to make Scheme for Max and Scheme for Pd, extensions to the Max and Pd computer music platform to allow scripting them in Scheme. (https://github.com/iainctduncan/scheme-for-max) Janet was one of the options I looked pretty closely at before choosing s7.

The author (Bill Schottstaedt, Stanford CCRMA) is not too interested in making pretty web pages, ha, but the language is great!

Project page: https://github.com/iainctduncan/scheme-for-max

I created Scheme for Max and Scheme for Pure Data. They are extensions to the Max/MSP, Ableton Live, and Pure Data computer music environments that embed an s7 Scheme interpreter in the host so that you can script, automate, and live code the hosts with s7, a Scheme from the CCRMA computer music center at Stanford and the same one used in the Snd editor and the Common Music 3 algorithmic composition environment. This allows you to do things like write algorithmic music tools, sequencers, and use the Ableton Live API in Scheme, including with Common Lisp style macros. It has an API for integrating with Max to share data structures, hook into the scheduler, run in the high priority thread, and so on. S4M allows you to do all the goodness of high level music programming in a Lisp, without losing the ability to use modern commercial tooling and instruments. It's my thesis project for a Masters in Music Technology with Andy Schloss and George Tzanetakis at the University of Victoria, and I plan to continue to a PhD working on it. I tried submitting twice, but it never made the page, which surprised me a bit given Lisp interest here.

The github page is here: https://github.com/iainctduncan/scheme-for-max

The youtube channel with various demos is here: https://www.youtube.com/c/musicwithlisp

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.