urn VS glsp

There's many different languages that can compile to Lua: - TypeScript is probably the most well-known and most compatible language for Lua. The TypeScriptToLua compiler lets you compile TypeScript code into Lua with a mostly 1:1 conversion. You can use the @jackmacwindows/craftos-types and @jackmacwindows/cc-types NPM packages to add typing declarations for CraftOS APIs and modules. Alternatively, use my template repo for a more ready-to-go setup. - Haxe was built with compilation to Lua in mind, and so you can write code for it and have it run just fine in CC. There's some declarations for it available online, and I also have my own typing set for it (which I should really upload somewhere - DM me if you want it for now). - C# can also compile to Lua, but it's a bit tough to get working right in CC, as it has a huge default library and abuses the global table in a way that CC has trouble with. However, it's possible to use, and I've gotten it working in the past (unfortunately, I don't know how anymore). - Urn is a Lisp dialect that was built by two CC devs and was designed to run in CC. However, I wouldn't recommend it unless you're good with functional programming.

Also, if the microcontroller you're working with is an ESP32 chip, you may be able to use use one of the lisp-to-Lua transpiled languages (urn or fennel) with something like Lua RTOS or NodeMCU. Not entirely sure how well this works in practice, but in theory it should be possible. Of the two, Fennel's probably more likely to behave well when used like this because it's more like a thin translation layer on top of Lua, but Urn's probably going to feel more comfortable to use because it feels like this weird mix of CL and Racket design.

Urn Lisp, A Lisp implementation on top of Lua: https://urn-lang.com

I don't know how much of reloading you need. I did something like that many moons ago. See here: https://github.com/SquidDev/urn/issues/12

Clone Urn: wget run https://gist.githubusercontent.com/SquidDev/e0f82765bfdefd48b0b15a5c06c0603b/raw/clone.lua https://github.com/SquidDev/urn.git (or similar)

3. Typed Racket

I almost used https://gamelisp.rs/ for a project but the nightly feature it needs broke and it's no longer maintained, glad to see something similar arise! You might want to consider adopting their choice of VecDeque as a list replacement, I think it makes a lot more sense than naive linked lists on modern machines.

Varied employment history has left me with great soft skills and a broad grab-bag of technical skills, mostly leaning towards high-performance systems programming. Major solo projects have included the scripting language GameLisp, a 2D game engine, and a novel computer vision library.

"Gamelisp is a scripting language for Rust game development." Feature list from the page: No garbage collection pauses (runs gc once per frame), Seamless Rust API, Memory-safe, Feature-rich ("Pattern‑matching, iterators, coroutines, macros..."), Easy entity scripting.

I'm using Rust to build a host program, and the actual game logic written in GameLisp on top of the bracket-lib. I only have superficial knowledge of Rust, 0 lisp experience, and never embedded a language before, so that's a lot to learn and implement at the same time.

I'm not sure I'll go to the end of the 8 weeks, but I'll make that as fun/interesting as possible and (try to) use GameLisp!

I feel qualified to answer this! GameLisp was once implemented with highly unsafe code, but later on I reimplemented it using only safe code, with a very small amount of optional unsafety behind a feature flag. GameLisp's performance is currently somewhere between Lua and Python when unsafe code is switched on, or a bit slower than Python when unsafe code is switched off.

It took a lot of wrestling with the type system, but I've managed to wring out several API improvements for version 0.2. I already considered GameLisp's Rust API to be best-in-class, and this release polishes it even further: