Pimacs: a toy implementation of an Elisp interpreter in Go

Hey /r/emacs, I've been working on this project on-and-off for the last months; it is a very small implementation of an Elisp interpreter written in Go. You can try it out by following the instructions on the Readme file. I've also documented a lot of the design decisions I made when developing it, alongside with some stuff about Emacs itself: [see here](https://github.com/federicotdn/pimacs/blob/main/etc/design.md). This information may also be useful for you if you're trying to understand how Emacs works internally (at C-code level).

We need less Lisp, not more. I think here in /r/emacs, people are in an echo chamber, and think that ELisp or Lisp in general is actually good. But the industry says differently, since decades. And you can have macros even outside of Lisp, look e.g. at Nim.

Did you try to load the Emacs libraries in it? How did it go?

Not yet! I am still missing some important functionality such as `defmacro` and `defun` which makes it impossible to load most libraries. It would definitely be cool to do it at some point though. Which (small) library would you try loading first?

I see. Good luck with that then. It sounds like quite an effort. Making a macro engine sounds difficult. 😊👍

(seethe . cope)

Oooh good question about the small library. I initially missed that question. Maybe try the emacs bootstrap script? 🤔 I don't know if that's feasible. I never went in deep with elisp tbh. I am more in to Common Lisp tbh.

have fun with your niche fork of Emacs that uses Lua or something i guess

> ELisp or Lisp in general is actually good. Maybe it's not that good, but it's still better than a non-lisp of the same age, these days I would prefer a modern Lisp, for sure > But the industry says differently, since decades. actually, Lisps have been in Top-10 for decades (until the 90s) > But the industry says differently, since decades. is this the same industry that invented C and PHP?

> than a non-lisp of the same age Sure. But we're 30+ years after this "same age" nowadays. Do you really want to compare today's Elisp with a language of back then, e.g. the BASIC interpreter of the Apple II, or with UCSD Pascal? > (until the 90s) Exactly. And the 90s are how long ago? 30 years. I mean, the original VW Beetle has been top 1 for many years, the most sold car ever. Do you still think we should all buy this car today? So really, the arguments need to be better. That something used to be great aeons ago doesn't tell at all about it's quality today.

> Do you really want to compare today's Elisp with a language of back then Actually Elisp changed a lot over all those years, though some poor yearly architectural decisions (and people treating those as sacked cow) limit its evolution a lot. But I'm not even talking about elisp, but for lisps in general. For every epoch, a lisp language of the age is still better than a non-lisp one (say, Clojure vs. Scala). > Exactly. And the 90s are how long ago? 30 years. python, ruby, js, java are all from the yearly 90s, btw.