slimv VS femtolisp

I use Vim with slimv, and have for years.

Maybe you should stick to one new thing at a time. Vim is more than capable of handling Common Lisp. Look at Slimv and Vlime for vim-style SLIME. Focus on CL first. You can come back to Doom / Emacs later.

Neovim works just fine. I use Neoterm to send-to-repl, here's what my config looks like. Your other options include vlime and slimv. I switched to neoterm because it's simple, explicit, and doesn't create unpredictable windows. Works for any other language just as well.

https://GitHub.com/jpalardy/vim-slime is a terrible SLIME to be honest! It is not even a SLIME. It just This does not look like SLIME. It just copies text from one text buffer and paste it to another Vim buffer which is probably running a REPL. "Probably" because who knows what the target buffer is running. vim-slime does not care. This is not Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for $EDITOR (SLIME) in any way.

vim-slime does not connect to any Swank server. It does not understanding Lisp s-expressions. It would happily copy any random text into any random REPL and call it job done! Lisp interaction mode is much much more than just copying and pasting text around. A superior lisp interaction mode gives you live debugging, handling conditions, inspecting variables, navigating the stack frames, ... Vim-slime cannot do anything like this because, well, it just copy-pastes stuff around. Vim-slime is a disingenious and misleading name for a project that is not SLIME.

If you really want to use Vim, do yourself a favor and use https://github.com/kovisoft/slimv and experience a true Lisp interaction mode.

Join me vim brother and don't settle for forcing yourself to use emacs while developing in CL when you don't have to! You even have two vim options! https://github.com/kovisoft/slimv and https://github.com/vlime/vlime with a great comparison of the two: https://susam.net/blog/lisp-in-vim.html

I've seen SLIMV recommended as a SLIME alternative for Vim. Like SLIME, SLIMV is a SWANK client.

I found Vlime to be more updated than slimv and give a smoother experience. With time I've switched to bare neoterm which I highly recommend. CL and lisps in general are designed with a text repl in mind, so this is the method that is guaranteed to work on every obscure CL distribution, and also transfer well to any other REPL-based languages.

If you are already familiar with vim you may want to use slimv

You need Parinfer. Several versions are available for Vim. It's easier to learn than Paredit and works better with Vim-style editing anyway. Lisp emphasizes interactivity with the REPL. It helps if you can send forms you're editing to the REPL for testing. Try something like slimv.

> 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