CLAY (Common Lisp According to Yogurt) is a version of common lisp with an interpreter written in rust. Development is tested against SBCL.

First clone this repo. Then cd into the repo directory. Then build with the release flag (cargo build --release). Then copy the binary to a somewhere in your path variable.

on linux:

$ > git clone https://github.com/calacuda/clay.git
$ > git clone https://github.com/calacuda/clay_lib.git
$ > cd clay
$ > cargo build --release
$ > cp /target/release/clay ~/.local/bin

Consider this lisp function that calculates factorials recursively.

(defun fact (k)
  ;(write-line "k is " k)
  (if (< k 2)
      1
    (* k (fact (- k 1)))
    )
  )

(write (fact 5))
(terpri)

the line that is commented out is commented out because, it will not work in SBCL.

This code is stored in the "test.lisp" file. To run it with sbcl one would type:

$ sbcl --script test.lisp

to run with clay:

$ clay test.lisp

if you need/want to look at the lexer, parser, and bytecode compiler output, run using "--test".

SBCL:

$ > hyperfine -r 1000 "sbcl --script test.lisp"
Benchmark #1: sbcl --script test.lisp
  Time (mean ± σ):       8.8 ms ±   2.3 ms    [User: 4.2 ms, System: 4.9 ms]
  Range (min … max):     6.9 ms …  17.9 ms    1000 runs

clay:

$ > hyperfine -r 1000 "target/release/clay test.lisp"
Benchmark #1: target/release/clay test.lisp
  Time (mean ± σ):       1.6 ms ±   1.3 ms    [User: 1.3 ms, System: 1.3 ms]
  Range (min … max):     0.5 ms …   9.2 ms    1000 runs

In other words my implementation is faster then SBCL. However SBCL is much, and I mean much, better at dealing with large numbers.

• implement an import statement to add libraries to the current name space.
• test if C libraries can be imported.
• enable saving of byte code to a file.
• compiled rust lib loading.

• clean up the code (delete unneeded commented lines, fix cargo warnings, etc).

I got a good start on this project, and not to mention a better grasp of rust from looking at another similar GitHub project (this github). this is the same place I got the Lexer from.