Lips programming language

Rationale

There aren’t many embeddable lisps out there. One could argue that there are some projects like guile, s7 lisp, racket etc. But I want something very simple yet fast like lua. Lips tries to be both very simple and featureful language.

Why use lips:

• small and easy to integrate codebase. The interpreter is implemented in two files: lips.h and lips.c. There are nearly 3000 lines of code in this files. I guarantee that in future interpreter won’t exceed 5000 Loc. However there’re will be some additional modules.
• performance.
• simplified syntax. Lisp syntax is best syntax for programming ever. Period.

Why not use lips

• There’re probably some bugs.
• API is unstable.
• No libraries/packages. One should write them by themselves using FFI. I plan to write some standard modules though.
• No support for common text editors. I plan for writing some mode for Emacs. For now if you use Emacs you can put “;; -*- mode: scheme -*-” at beginning of a file.

Roadmap

Builtin property lists aka plists

Improve tests

Decent error handling

Exceptions are implemented. Need to improve error handling inside internal functions.

User-defined types

This is a needed feature.

Builtin functions/macros

1. arithmetic functions that work both on integers and floats(+, /, - etc.)
2. list managing functions(car, list, caddaar etc.)
3. general functions(===, nilp, typeof etc.)
4. environment functions(eval, intern etc.)
5. string functions(format, concat, capitalize etc.).

Docstrings

Syntactic sugar

(quote something) -> 'something
(lambda (a) $car (list a 7 6 5)) -> (lambda (a) (car (list a 7 6 5)))

Narrow down amount of allocations