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Fennel: A Practical Lisp

mattroelle.com

31–40 of 91 posts

Re: Fennel: A Practical Lisp

#33
post #30

Fennel is really cool, and the fact that it builds on Lua—an already-popular language—is a huge win; Fennel gets access to the entire Lua ecosystem. Importantly, Lua is pretty easy to embed in native applications. I haven’t found a Lisp or Scheme as easily-embeddable as Lua(+Fennel). It’s also a good drop-in replacement for Lua. I write my Hammerspoon config in Fennel, and hopefully my Neovim config soon as well.

As a fellow hammerspoon user who is not smitten with Lua’s syntax, I would really appreciate seeing your config :-)

It’s pretty minimal right now as I’m in the process of porting over a larger config. Here’s what I have, although you might find it might be a bit underwhelming:

https://github.com/jonpalmisc/dotfiles/blob/master/hammerspo...

Re: Fennel: A Practical Lisp

#35
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I follow; it's an advantage that it doesn't work well on Windows?

Might help encourage you to move away from Windows.

I have plenty of reasons to move away from Windows, and also plenty of reasons to stay. :) But I think it's overall a net-negative that there is no simple way to use LuaRocks on Windows. I don't believe in gatekeeping, especially when so many programmers still begin their journey on Windows.

Re: Fennel: A Practical Lisp

#36
post #4

Calvin rose, the author of fennel is a really great programmer and an even better language designer. Personally, i dont use or like lua, but I'm a big fan of one of his other projects, janet[0] [0] https://github.com/janet-lang/janet

I love that it comes with build instructions for Haiku—and that they're listed before Windows!

Re: Fennel: A Practical Lisp

#37
See also:

Fennel – Lisp in Lua (2020, 112 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24390904

Fennel – Lisp in Lua (2018, 62 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18016168

Neovim Configuration and Plugins in Fennel Lisp (2019, 19 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21676606

Raymarching with Fennel and LÖVE (2019, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24835766

Re: Fennel: A Practical Lisp

#39
post #26

Curious how this compares to Guile. Guile is designed for embedding. But it is vanilla Scheme, which might not be as modern as the Fennel flavor. Maybe, the Fennel all gets lowered to Lua at build time, so you don't need a (maybe more expensive) Guile runtime? Or, Lua has a more comprehensive library ecosystem?

If I recall correctly, you can do both. You can compile your fennel code to lua, or you can use fennel as a library in your lua application so it will understand your fennel code.

Re: Fennel: A Practical Lisp

#40
post #26

Curious how this compares to Guile. Guile is designed for embedding. But it is vanilla Scheme, which might not be as modern as the Fennel flavor. Maybe, the Fennel all gets lowered to Lua at build time, so you don't need a (maybe more expensive) Guile runtime? Or, Lua has a more comprehensive library ecosystem?

Correct, it's all converted to Lua, Fennel has no runtime.
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