LightLisp

Notitia linguarum est prima porta sapientiae.

Човекът е толкова пъти човек, колкото езика знае.

學而時習之 不亦說乎

Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem.

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.

I ka 'ōlelo no ke ola; i ka 'ōlelo no ka make

Beatha teanga í a labhairt

..okay, you got the idea.

Prerequisites

• CMake 3.15 or newer
• Ninja (optional)
• LLVM (with development headers)
• A C++20-capable compiler (e.g. clang++)

Building

From the project root:

./build.sh

This produces the compiler executable at:

build/src/lightlisp

Compiling a Lisp program

Given a file myprog.lisp, run:

./build/src/lightlisp myprog.lisp

This will emit two files in the working directory:

• myprog.lisp.ll – the generated LLVM IR
• myprog.o – the compiled object file

To turn that into a native executable:

clang++ myprog.o -o myprog

Now you can run your program:

./myprog

About LightLisp

LightLisp is a minimalist Lisp dialect (integers, cons cells, car/cdr, +, -, *, <, if, etc.) with a AOT compiler front end. It's designed purely for learning and experimentation--feel free to clone, hack on it, and study how code generation works. I hope I would manage to expand this into a full tutorial one day.