Janet – a Lisp-like functional, imperative programming language

I am a happy though very new Janet user. I started migrating my existing workflow optimization scripts (e.g. Git wrappers) to--and writing new ones--in Janet as of a few months ago. I used to use Perl but I switched to Janet as it is a much simpler language and VM, and being a Lisp is ~infinitely extensible. Janet has os/ and file/ packages, as well as a PEG system which mostly stand in for the best features of Perl. Some…

I like it, because I like Lisps, and it seems portable enough. I was looking into Fennel, Urn, and Lumen, which are Lua-related Lisps, but given the small size of Lua, put them in the same size bracket or lower as Janet. On another note, I was excited to see 42 comments on this, but then realized over half of them were on a thread of gender and PL names. Fair discussion I guess, but I was hoping to geek…

Janet is a functional and imperative programming language. It runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, BSDs, and should run on other systems with some porting. The entire language (core library, interpreter, compiler, assembler, PEG) is less than 1MB. You can also add Janet scripting to an application by embedding a single C source file and a single header.

Interesting language. Some observations. 1. Great startup time. Hello world took 0.015 seconds. 2. To get readline on REPL use: rlwrap ./janet -s 3. (os.exit) did not exit the REPL, but (os/exit) did. Looks like doc bug in GitHub README.md. 4. Syntax of for is different from Clojure and not as general. Instead of (for [x (range 10)] (print x) use (for x 1 10 (print x)). 5. Core API docs are at https://janet-lang.org/doc.html. Useful reference. Examples with each one…