What does HackerNews think of minilisp?

A readable lisp in less than 1k lines of C

Language: C

Just found one after replying to another comment on this story.

https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/1989/jar.2.c (accompanying explanation: https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/1989/jar.2.h... )

It apparently works somewhat after a few minor tweaks.

Another one that I've bookmarked some months earlier: https://github.com/rui314/minilisp

I would think it is easier to develop a Lisp-like language in C, because Lisp usually is executed by means of an interpretter, due to the dynamic behavior of Lisp where you can redefine functions on the fly. See https://github.com/rui314/minilisp as an example of many available implementations.

Because Lisp is primarily a functional language, it would be kind of hard to emulate C-like behavior.

This person wrote a lisp in 1K lines of C (not bytes :)), the cool thing is that also includes a copying garbage collector.

https://github.com/rui314/minilisp

If you are interested in this, you may find one of my Lisp implementation interesting too. It's implemented less than 1k lines of heavily-commented C, but it even supports a macro system and copying GC in addition to the common features you would usually see in small Lisps.

https://github.com/rui314/minilisp