Glad you wrote this set of experiences up.
I’ve followed BuildYourOwnLisp[0] in the past, so it’s cool to see something that is more focused on the compilation of Lisp rather than its implementation as a language.
Ha! If I only knew about 'Build Your Own Lisp' three months ago!
I needed a simple language as a vehicle for a compiler talk I'm preparing for this summer, so I hacked along an extremely reduced LISP (a 'Non-LISP', as I call it), whose C++ implementation from scratch came out at about 1K -- 1.2K LOC with the AST optimizations I meant to demonstrate for the talk. Self-contained code here -- no libs or (much) STL: https://github.com/blu/tinl
OP, thank you for sharing Tim Morgan's work -- it's a work of love!
You're aware of clasp?
https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp
Which builds (in part) on embeddable common lisp:
https://gitlab.com/embeddable-common-lisp/ecl
See around 20-30 minutes: https://youtu.be/8X69_42Mj-g