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A Lysp yn Kotlin — like the other Lisps I made, a hobby project (2024 – 2025)
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  • Common Lisp 41%
  • Python 0.9%
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Juergen Nickelsen d930984c2b l/lyc: go in the direction of Common Lisp compatibility
2026-05-16 08:38:23 +02:00
_morgue made if, when, unless macros based on cond 2024-05-15 15:36:22 +02:00
doc symbols are now case-insensitive 2024-07-16 09:22:39 +02:00
external add ISLISP spec; maybe that could become relevant 2024-07-15 08:04:25 +02:00
src l/lyc: go in the direction of Common Lisp compatibility 2026-05-16 08:38:23 +02:00
.gitignore make an install package (tarball) 2024-09-25 09:53:10 +02:00
INSTALL.md build script now /make, a symlink to make.sh 2024-07-15 09:09:50 +02:00
LICENSE LICENSE: mention src/l.lyc, which is in the public domain 2024-08-03 19:57:58 +02:00
make build script now /make, a symlink to make.sh 2024-07-15 09:09:50 +02:00
README.md README.md: typo fix 2025-05-25 11:13:32 +02:00

README.md

Lyk -- Lysp yn Kotlin

Update: Seeing that the Kotlin and Java runtime libraries actually don't offer all functionality I could ever wish for, but rather lack in system functionality like file system access and process control, as well as other POSIX functionality that is of course present in e.g. Python, let alone Perl, was a big disappointment. I know there is a way around it with jna-posix, but I don't want to go that route. I rather intend to port the progress that I have made in Lyk back to its mother implementation Lys and make another attempt to tackle the complexity of Apple's macOS system libraries, now in earnest.

See more about that plan in the Lys repository. [2025-05-24 ni]

This is a small Lisp implementation in Kotlin, running on the JVM. While I am not the biggest fan of JVM-based things because you'll always have to schlep that huge runtime around, I am curious. (I know there is the native option, but its functionality feels limited.)

Kotlin feels remarkably similar to Swift, such that I could take the Swift code from Lys, a previous Lisp implementation, do a few replacements like s/func/fun/ and things, and then let the compiler show me where it still needed work. (It would have been possible to automate some more transformations, but it didn't seem worth the effort.) This worked even with bigger and more complex parts like the reader and eval, so I had a working REPL fast.

Work in progress as of June 2024, finally got through the regression test suite that I originally made for an earlier Lisp. Macros seems to work well now that I have followed Steele's advice about how they should be dealt with. The RPN calculator l/lyc seems to mostly work now -- it is, admittedly, the only application that I really use a lot, so that is significant.

Bigger things ahead are some debugging help in eval, a non-recursive eval with an explicit call stack, and of course many more builtin functions, including networking and I/O multiplexing facilities.

Lyk uses the JLine line editor Version 2 for the interactive input line; see the subdirectory external/jline/. This is not the current release version, but it was rather easy to integrate, which the current one wasn't. The completion on symbol names is a bit clumsy, but that is due to my completer implementation, not JLine's.

Please see the files in the doc/ subdirectory for more information, in particular doc/lyk.md. It contains a few pointers how to explore lyk.

-- ni@w21.org 2024-06