ref: 7bcf6ac7b612306d197d063aaf6d971ca5dd2e3f
dir: /README.md/
# femtolisp A compact interpreter for a minimal lisp/scheme dialect. This is a reanimation of https://github.com/lambdaconservatory/femtolisp with bigger plans. Supported OS: [9front](http://9front.org), Unix-like operating systems (OpenBSD, NetBSD, Linux, etc). Supported CPUs: any decent 32 or 64-bit, little or big endian. Tested on: 9front/arm64, OpenBSD/386, NetBSD/sparc64, Alpine/amd64, Android/arm64. Some of the changes from the original include: * aggressive clean up, removal, renaming and refactoring * docstrings `(define (f ...) "Docs here" ...)` * proper `(void)` and `void?` * seamless arbitrary precision integers * `[` and `]`, `{` and `}` are synonyms to `(` and `)` * `λ` as a shorthand for `lambda` * some of the previously available (but not merged) patches from the community and [Julia](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia) are applied * `c***r` of empty list returns empty list * "boot" image is built into the executable * vm opcode definitions and tables are generated from a single file * fixed bootstrap (makes it work properly when opcodes change) * built-in symbols aren't constants and can be redefined ## Building ### POSIX meson setup build -Dbuildtype=release ninja -C build test ### Plan 9 mk all test ## Characteristics * lexical scope, lisp-1 * unrestricted macros * case-sensitive * simple compacting copying garbage collector * Scheme-style varargs (dotted formal argument lists) * "human-readable" bytecode with self-hosted compiler * circular structure can be printed and read * `#.` read macro for eval-when-read and readably printing builtins * read macros for backquote * symbol character-escaping printer * exceptions * gensyms (can be usefully read back in, too) * `#| multiline comments |#`, `#;(block comment...`, lots of other lexical syntax * generic compare function, cyclic equal * cvalues system providing C data types and a C FFI * constructor notation for nicely printing arbitrary values