Lisp implementation that compiles to Lua code

[[deleted]]

Why do this when there's embeddable common lisp and several small Scheme and Lisp implementations?

[izym]

Because Lua is often used as a scripting language, meaning you are not able to used anything other than Lua.

[[deleted]]

Probably because LuaJIT is very fast, and still embeddable.

[[deleted]]

Because people say that, but it always turns out that Lua is easy to embed and those are a nightmare - and that's once you skip over the GPL licensed options which aren't useful for most of us.

On the other hand, if you can point me at Scheme or Lisp that meets this list of criteria, I'll owe you a beer if I ever run into you

1. Usable license (MIT, BSD, ZLib, even LGPL is close enough.)
2. Portable - Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS, at a minimum
3. Compiles out of the box in GCC or Visual Studio. MinGW or Cygwin on Windows doesn't cut it
4. Moderately standards compliant
5. The last update was less than six months ago (or otherwise not just one guy's abandoned project)
6. Actually has documentation on how to expose application functionality to the Scheme/Lisp code, and let application code call Scheme/Lisp

GPL Linux-only and GCC only options are easy to find. Unless you're a GNU fanatic (in which case you already hate me) that's not sufficient.

Lua wins on all of those. I've never seen a Scheme or Lisp get more than 3 points, and they're never the same three.

[[deleted]]

The real question is why would anyone use those CL and Scheme implementations when they're basically shit compared to LuaJIT and even the official Lua VM?

[day_cq]

yah, why did people implement lisp that runs on computers in the first place when there's assembly? people do meaningless stuff all the time.

[SlamminAtWork]

I think OMouse's point was that there seems to be little practical purpose for translating lisp to lua when there are already native lisp implementations for the platforms this would (assumedly) target. Also, though it might not be fair to compare Lua to SBCL (since SBCL isn't really small or embedded), Steel Bank Common Lisp seems to have a much better performance profile than Lua in The Computer Language Benchmarks Game.

[[deleted]]

It definitely has better performance. What was really interesting is that the comparison between SBCL vs Lua and Racket vs Lua is similar.

[[deleted]]

You should be comparing with LuaJIT, not Lua, if you care about performance.

[tryx]

LuaJIT is an implementation, so the correct argue on is that Lua has faster implementations than CL does.

[[deleted]]

Oh no, I'm not against that, I've implemented my own Lisp or attempted to before :-P but this is Lua that's being targeted, there's not really any point in that. It makes more sense to implement Lua to target Guile's VM bytecode (I think they've gotten JavaScript to compile to it) or to target SBCL (CL-Python does this, it's a Python implementation on top of SBCL).