Comment by 1313ed01
5 hours ago
There is also fennel, earlier language originally by same developer, that is similar, but compiles to, and is fully implemented in, Lua. No standard library of its own so missing many nice things like the parser library from janet, but it is good for writing scripts for things that embed Lua.
Fennel really is great, and a great way to get into the clojure family. My biggest gripe with it is that debugging is the typical transpilation bed of needles. The bridge between Fennel and the Lua VM is super fragile, and it just doesn't have half the quality of the Janet debugger and REPL. It's a real shame, because Fennel is way more portable, and thanks to LuaJIT is capable of breaking SBCL's jaw, which is absolutely fucking insane. But the transpilation experience just completely kneecaps it imo. There are workarounds you can do, but even if you mess around with implementing a debug.setinfo you still run into less-than-fun edge cases like with match-blocks.
I think there's a lot of value in forking LuaJIT2 and reworking the debugging and error structures within to make it more suitable for language transparency. Doing so would make languages like Fennel much more attractive.
Is fennel clojure-ish? I’m vaguely aware of it being a lisp, but I didn’t know it was clojure-ey. Pretty neat sounding!
All new Lisps since ~2010 have been Clojure-y-: https://p.hagelb.org/new-lisps.html (Lone Lisp and LispE are the only exceptions and LispE still has _some_ Clojure features.)
> capable of breaking SBCL's jaw
What exactly do you mean by this? Speed? Portability? Ease of use?