JeffBezanson/femtolisp

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1721 stars · 124 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

FemtoLisp is a lightweight, self-contained Scheme-like Lisp interpreter written in under 1000 lines of C, featuring a bytecode compiler and VM. It offers a compact yet powerful feature set including proper tail recursion, exceptions, hash tables, a compacting GC, and C FFI support via ctypes-style bindings.

Use cases

• embed a small scripting language in a C application
• study how a Lisp interpreter and bytecode VM are implemented
• run a fast lightweight Scheme dialect from the command line
• call C functions from a scripting language without heavy dependencies
• learn Lisp with a minimal, readable implementation

When to choose

• you need a tiny (~150kb), self-contained scripting runtime with minimal dependencies
• you want a fast Scheme-like interpreter that is easy to read and modify
• you need C interop from a lightweight scripting language

When to avoid

• you need a full R6RS/R7RS-compliant Scheme with a large standard library
• you need native compilation or production-grade concurrency
• you need an actively developed project with frequent releases

Facets

cli-tool · maturity maintenance

interpreter programming-language programming-languages compilers developer-tools cross-platform c cli lisp scheme small-runtime bytecode-vm ctypes-ffi interpreter

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="JeffBezanson/femtolisp")