Show HN: Kvist – a Lisp for systems programming that compiles to Odin

Very cool! I haven't used Odin myself, but from what I understand, it has a sort of dynamically-scoped-allocator system. How does that work in Kvist? Do you have direct control over allocators?

This looks awesome!

I think it might benefit from additional context and selling of the solution. I am probably adjacent to the target audience and I am struggling to grasp the scope of this. I think this might be HUGE but the fact that I am struggling to assess its enormity might be signal to you that a brief problem statement early in your documentation might help.

My Lisp family experience: 3 books on Common Lisp and around 5,000 lines of Common Lisp. Read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs twice (Scheme). Tinkered with Racket (co-routines and flow-typing). Read two books on Clojure. I "get" the power of macros (understanding anaphoric / deictic macros).

Spent 4 years working with PureScript, Haskell, and Elm.

So given all of that... a static type system for a Lisp... I have been in PureScript, Haskell, Elm for production code so I've been out of this sphere. How novel is that? That seems pretty awesome to me. Static types + macros is cool - to say the least. How do the static types actually interact with the developer experience? Do you have a language server? What is the feedback loop for identifying type errors i.e. IDE, compile-time, run-time?

What is the specific "value-add" here? Is it a homoiconic language over Odin so you can write macros and so implement DSLs? Or that you introduce identity/state patterns for functional programming with some mutation Clojure style?

I apologize for the wall of text above, autobiography, and the sloppy questions. The repo documentation is very comprehensive about the language >>featuresIs your audience language enthusiasts? Or working developers looking to try something on a small project?

Is this an experimental language where you are testing out language ideas and soliciting feedback? Or did you already build something substantial with this and you are releasing early so others can build too? If you built something with this already then that would be an awesome story to tell.

It looks like `check` checks the types as a command line operation. When I asked about the feedback loop I suppose I was asking if a language server was on your roadmap and how you would envision engineers working in the future.

Again, this is really impressive work and really exciting to Lisp and static type lovers.