Lisp is very cool. But one thing I do not like is that the syntax style `(fun a b c)` loses out to the less-symmetric "OO" style `a.fun(b, c)` when it comes to IDE auto-completion. And for me the IDE help is important to provide a smooth developer experience and minimize wasted brain energy. I'd like to find a way to make the editing and auto-completion work better. I think the way IDEs (and maybe our brains) work is: "here is a thing X, now what can I do to/with it?". That translates to typing in your editor: "X.[cursor here]", and then the IDE lets you see and search the things you can "do" with X. But if, in Lisp, you write "([cursor here]", you are immediately confronted with: "what is the signature of that function again?", but the IDE has nothing to go on. Maybe there is different style of editing, where we could type the arguments, and then trigger the auto-complete.
bcrosby95 40 minutes ago [-]
I don't know about other lisps, but Clojure has namespaces and that's good enough for me. So you can type "(foobar/" and get a list of functions in the foobar namespace.
xigoi 37 minutes ago [-]
Janet kind of has this too: if you import a module with (import foo), all the imported bindings will be prefixed with foo/. Also, this can be avoided by writing (use foo) instead.
kqr 53 minutes ago [-]
Haskell sort of has this. You type (_ a b c) and the compiler tells you which methods would make sense there based on all three variables (so in a sense it is even more useful.)
xigoi 35 minutes ago [-]
Janet, like some other lisps, has the arrow macro, which allows you to write in the “OO” style.
Does it have a native compiler and/or types? Basically, can it get in the ballpark of SBCL's performance?
It'd be nice to have something cleaner than Common Lisp, and a much smaller image size. If it has decent performance too, I'm sold.
ethan_smith 6 hours ago [-]
Janet uses a bytecode VM that's faster than many dynamic languages but won't match SBCL's native compilation performance; it has optional type annotations for documentation but not for optimization.
terminalbraid 6 hours ago [-]
Janet does compile to standalone executables with jpm
xigoi 33 minutes ago [-]
Just keep in mind that these executables are the Janet bytecode interpreter bundled with your bytecode, not “real” native executables.
atemerev 6 hours ago [-]
This is not a replacement for Common Lisp. It is in the same niche as Guile (but quite faster).
terminalbraid 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I see Janet as "what Guile intended itself to be", though it is quite a bit smaller (in some ways that's a postive). I find the choices it made to be more pragmatic and it's far more accessible in non-linux environments since Guile tied itself closely to guix.
anthk 3 hours ago [-]
Current Guile it's much faster.
zelphirkalt 4 hours ago [-]
When I see languages like this, I always wonder, how far the ecosystem is. I have used GNU Guile a lot and there are quite a few libraries for it, so that one can do almost anything. Web things are coming, but maybe not as fully there yet, as one might like. Racket also has lots of libraries. And even a standard library web framework.
So lets say I want to start my next web project in Janet. I already know Scheme and can probably quite easily just start writing another lisp, assuming it has TCO and I can do things mostly like I would in Scheme, except maybe for having to use funcall (which is annoying, but OK). Does Janet have libraries, that enable web projects? Like a web server and SXML or something like that? Or does it have things like a JSON parser? All these little things one would like to have, to not have to develop the basics first, before getting to the actual project.
And what about data structures? Are there functional data structures available? In GNU Guile I have at least the unmaintained guile-pfds. Hopefully, I will one day understand enough about functional data structures to build more or to maybe even maintain that library. But learning resources are scarce. It is already difficult to find a functional version of an AVL tree! Lots and lots of places merely teach non-persistent, non-functional versions of these data structures, and it is not trivial to translate them, might impact performance in ways that are not necessary, if one had great knowledge about how to make these data structures.
And also reproducibility! With GNU Guile I have what I need on Guix, which is great! With other languages, I might need to rely on older package managing approaches, that do not have reproducibility/determinism as the a high goal on their agenda, or might even lack the ability to create lock files/files with checksums. I don't want to go back to non-reproducible.
I am also eyeing statically typed variants like Carp. Same questions arise. Some seem really great and I would probably enjoy using them a lot. Would be a pity to then discover, that the ecosystem is just not there, and one has to create all the basic tools one needs oneself. Sometimes that can be fun, but it can also be exhausting and one never gets around to ones actual project.
veqq 34 minutes ago [-]
Janet has ~10 web frameworks (half SSG, half dynamic) and many web servers. Joy [0] is the most fully featured stack approach, which Janetdocs [1] runs on. But everything you mention is in the std lib. Here's a certbot in 10 lines only using the extended std lib (called spork): https://codeberg.org/veqq/janetdocs/src/branch/master/ssl-fe... `json/decode` automatically maps json to native data structures. There's a package manager included, which builds all code I've found so far, reproducibly.
As for DS, only arrays, there are maps, arrays and strings, all mutable or immutable. I don't think there's any intention to ever implement functional data structures, but they could "easily" be a library.
Is there anything that is janet-unique? I just did a cursory glance, and most of it seems like a scheme with slightly different syntax and a more "modern" standard library.
Why should I switch from my scheme of choice (guile) to Janet?
veqq 9 hours ago [-]
It's not a Scheme at all! It doesn't have cons cells after all. It's a Clojure-like (maps everywhere, collection api, immutable data structures) with 1mb executable and [servers](http://janetdocs.org/) running under 10mb of ram.
Fibers are very interesting, even used for error handling. I've not wrapped my head around PEGs yet.
bjoli 7 hours ago [-]
That makes sense. I have always thought about what I would do if I could make a "modern scheme". A lot would be taken from clojure but definitely not everything. Cons cells would stay, but the star of the show would be immutable vectors based on rrb trees or maybe finger trees (efficient concatenation, insertion in the middle etc), HAMTs , concurrentML (like guile-fibers) and a nice looping facility (like my own goof-loop[1]) and restricted mutation. Syntax-case and syntax-parse from racket. An extensible pattern matcher (like the one found in racket).
I would also make strings immutable, maybe like Guile's cow-strings, maybe blobs-with-cursors.
Definitely just copy Guile's delimited continuations.
I think I would just ignore most of r7rs, since I don't think it improves things for the progrmmer.
ggm 9 hours ago [-]
If a language lacks cons can it truly be held to be a lisp or has heresy taken over?
tkrn 2 hours ago [-]
Although I'm a recovering sexp addict I must confess that I fail to see what makes the cons cell so important to those purer in their faith?
To me the homoiconity of Lisp is mainly about code-as-data, the exact nature of the data doesn't matter to me that much as long as it's a first class citizen and enclosed in nicely balanced parenthesis (though sadly here Janet seems to have fallen to the temptations of the curly braces, and thus, is indeed heresy).
gorjusborg 48 minutes ago [-]
I am a heretic, but I agree that it seems the power of code as data can exist outside a linked list.
I will not give up my curly braces or square brackets.
exe34 7 hours ago [-]
It's got Lots of Indented Silly Parentheses.
girvo 7 hours ago [-]
PEGs (even outside Janet) are amazing and what I reach for all the time :) definitely one of those tools that’s worth learning!
natrys 6 hours ago [-]
Yep peg.el[1] is now built-into Emacs since 30.1 (which is how I came to know of it, but actually the library seems much older) and it makes certain things much simpler and faster to do than before (once you figure out its quirks).
Thank you for janetdocs.org , I hated having the missing functions from janetdocs.com
3036e4 7 hours ago [-]
I did most of the 2023 Advent of Code using Janet and it was a great experience. I forced myself to use PEGs as much as possible, even when it was overkill, and I really began to like those for the readability and ease compared to other parsers/regexps that I have used.
I like that it is a small language without dependencies. Have it installed everywhere, including in termux on my phone. Good for scripting.
Used to daydream about a native Clojure and Janet is close enough to that. Does not have everything, but the cost in size and dependencies is so much lower. It is simpler and easier and runs well even on a RPi Zero.
I would tend to use Janet for scripts, especially ones that need to talk to the outside world because of its fast startup and batteries included standard library (particularly for messing with JSON, making HTTPS requests, parsing with PEGs, storing data in maps), while I would use guile for larger projects where things like modularity, performance, or metaprogramming were more important to me.
That being said, these days I use Clojure for both (I use babashka to run scripts: https://babashka.org/)
terminalbraid 7 hours ago [-]
One big difference is you can compile Janet programs down to executables without any additional dependencies or runtimes. It makes distribution extremely nice. The ffi is also much easier.
xigoi 6 hours ago [-]
One thing I really like about Janet, compared to Scheme, is that it’s one language instead of a family of similar but incompatible languages.
atemerev 6 hours ago [-]
If you are happy with Guile, I guess Janet is not worth switching (it is faster, though). It is absolutely and explicitly not Scheme, though. More like natively compiled and script-optimized Clojure.
worthless-trash 9 hours ago [-]
I don't know enough about guile, but janet was pretty easy to develop for .
Its binaries are quite small, could wrap and embed raylib and a few small c libraries with no hassle. This makes distribution much easier.
For my simple 2d game jaylib (raylib) code.
ls -laoh build/app
-rwxr-xr-x 1 worthless 2.8M 27 Jul 17:28 build/app
otool -L ./build/app
./build/app:
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1356.0.0)
/System/Library/Frameworks/Cocoa.framework/Versions/A/Cocoa (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 24.0.0)
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreVideo.framework/Versions/A/CoreVideo (compatibility version 1.2.0, current version 706.41.0)
/System/Library/Frameworks/IOKit.framework/Versions/A/IOKit (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 275.0.0)
/System/Library/Frameworks/OpenGL.framework/Versions/A/OpenGL (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0)
/System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/AppKit (compatibility version 45.0.0, current version 2674.3.0)
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Versions/A/CoreFoundation (compatibility version 150.0.0, current version 4034.0.0)
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/CoreGraphics (compatibility version 64.0.0, current version 1951.0.4)
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/CoreServices (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1226.0.0)
/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Versions/C/Foundation (compatibility version 300.0.0, current version 4034.0.0)
/usr/lib/libobjc.A.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 228.0.0)
I believe those are pretty standard to have on most OSX machines, the situation is similar for my Linux system.
The LLM's really can't deal with janet though, they seem to think its clojure and screw up a lot of things.
johnisgood 5 hours ago [-]
Feed your LLMs the documentation and example code (perhaps the whole stdlib if it fits). Tell your LLM that it is not Clojure nor Scheme, it is a different language. I have worked with more niche languages than Janet with Claude before this way, successfully.
NeutralForest 6 hours ago [-]
Janet is awesome but pretty please, work on the tooling. There's very little in the way of working and debugging interactively with the REPL from any IDE that I know of and last time I tried (on Emacs) there was barely a dedicated mode to work with it.
NeutralForest 4 hours ago [-]
Since other people mentioned there's been work there, here is my Emacs config now:
(use-package janet-ts-mode
:ensure t
:defer t
:vc (:url "https://github.com/sogaiu/janet-ts-mode"
:rev :newest))
(use-package ajrepl
:ensure t
:defer t
:vc (:url "https://github.com/sogaiu/ajrepl"
:rev :newest)
:hook (janet-ts-mode . ajrepl-interaction-mode))
Also, a fix for treesit auto to not ask for the grammar every time:
It is unfortunate that there doesn't seem to be a GUI library --- if there was one _and_ if one could easily compile to a stand-alone program for distribution, this would be very interesting to me.
For bonus points, compiling to a stand-alone JavaScript wrapped in HTML would be awesome if it could be hosted on a Github page.
For a GUI in a limited sense you can use TIC-80 with its built-in Janet support. It can export to stand-alone binaries too, but I did not try that (and I mostly used TIC-80 with Fennel, not Janet).
Obviously I understand most of the time someone wants to make a GUI they are not thinking about something like TIC-80. I agree a more complete GUI library would be nice.
But if nothing else it may be worth mentioning that TIC-80 is a fun and easy way to install and try Janet. Even the Android version comes with Janet and a built-in code editor. Just run "new janet" in the TIC-80 console and then press F1 (on Android TIC-80 by default uses its own virtual keyboard that has all the keys it needs) to open the code editor.
3036e4 4 hours ago [-]
Problem with the Android version is how ... to access the files it saves (or exports to). They seem to end up in the app-specific data directory that no other app can read on newer versions of Android.
terminalbraid 4 hours ago [-]
Given your criterion for what a "fortunate" language would be, what language includes a GUI library, compiles to a stand-alone program for distribution, as well as "Javascript wrapped in HTML"?
It doesn't exist as an opensource option anymore (since Livecode did their rugpull) AFAICT, it's something I've been looking for since then.
Similarly, they were supposed to offer "compile to HTML5", but it never really worked for me.
terminalbraid 3 hours ago [-]
Just so I'm clear, you then feel compelled to openly and publicly label every literally programming language as "unfortunate" because it doesn't live up to what LiveCode aspired to be?
An opinion that flatly and individually labels every extant thing the same has no signal to it. I'm not sure what to make of your original post other than you're expressing displeasure at the universe for not handing you what you wanted and that you believe that expression should be injected into arbitrary discussion.
WillAdams 3 hours ago [-]
I will agree that the word choice was poor.
Should have phrased it as something along the lines of:
>This would be very interesting to me if it had support for a GUI library, and if it were then possible to compile to a stand-alone application which could be easily distributed.
https://odin-lang.org
https://github.com/DanielGavin/ols
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23164614
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34843306
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28255116
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28850861
It'd be nice to have something cleaner than Common Lisp, and a much smaller image size. If it has decent performance too, I'm sold.
So lets say I want to start my next web project in Janet. I already know Scheme and can probably quite easily just start writing another lisp, assuming it has TCO and I can do things mostly like I would in Scheme, except maybe for having to use funcall (which is annoying, but OK). Does Janet have libraries, that enable web projects? Like a web server and SXML or something like that? Or does it have things like a JSON parser? All these little things one would like to have, to not have to develop the basics first, before getting to the actual project.
And what about data structures? Are there functional data structures available? In GNU Guile I have at least the unmaintained guile-pfds. Hopefully, I will one day understand enough about functional data structures to build more or to maybe even maintain that library. But learning resources are scarce. It is already difficult to find a functional version of an AVL tree! Lots and lots of places merely teach non-persistent, non-functional versions of these data structures, and it is not trivial to translate them, might impact performance in ways that are not necessary, if one had great knowledge about how to make these data structures.
And also reproducibility! With GNU Guile I have what I need on Guix, which is great! With other languages, I might need to rely on older package managing approaches, that do not have reproducibility/determinism as the a high goal on their agenda, or might even lack the ability to create lock files/files with checksums. I don't want to go back to non-reproducible.
I am also eyeing statically typed variants like Carp. Same questions arise. Some seem really great and I would probably enjoy using them a lot. Would be a pity to then discover, that the ecosystem is just not there, and one has to create all the basic tools one needs oneself. Sometimes that can be fun, but it can also be exhausting and one never gets around to ones actual project.
As for DS, only arrays, there are maps, arrays and strings, all mutable or immutable. I don't think there's any intention to ever implement functional data structures, but they could "easily" be a library.
- [0] https://github.com/joy-framework/joy - [1] http://janetdocs.org/
Why should I switch from my scheme of choice (guile) to Janet?
Fibers are very interesting, even used for error handling. I've not wrapped my head around PEGs yet.
I would also make strings immutable, maybe like Guile's cow-strings, maybe blobs-with-cursors.
Definitely just copy Guile's delimited continuations.
I think I would just ignore most of r7rs, since I don't think it improves things for the progrmmer.
To me the homoiconity of Lisp is mainly about code-as-data, the exact nature of the data doesn't matter to me that much as long as it's a first class citizen and enclosed in nicely balanced parenthesis (though sadly here Janet seems to have fallen to the temptations of the curly braces, and thus, is indeed heresy).
I will not give up my curly braces or square brackets.
[1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/progm...
I like that it is a small language without dependencies. Have it installed everywhere, including in termux on my phone. Good for scripting.
Used to daydream about a native Clojure and Janet is close enough to that. Does not have everything, but the cost in size and dependencies is so much lower. It is simpler and easier and runs well even on a RPi Zero.
https://jank-lang.org/
That being said, these days I use Clojure for both (I use babashka to run scripts: https://babashka.org/)
Its binaries are quite small, could wrap and embed raylib and a few small c libraries with no hassle. This makes distribution much easier.
For my simple 2d game jaylib (raylib) code.
I believe those are pretty standard to have on most OSX machines, the situation is similar for my Linux system.The LLM's really can't deal with janet though, they seem to think its clojure and screw up a lot of things.
https://github.com/Olical/conjure
The LSP for it works reasonably well.
You should try again.
Start janet (usually i do it via jpm)
Then m-x ajsc and localhost:9365This should be default.
If you dont start it in debug mode, you can't redefine functions as they are running.
I have an example using it for live web stuff here: https://github.com/wmealing/janet-joy-live
According to [1], "the 3SUM problem asks if a given set of n real numbers contains three elements that sum to zero."
It's not clear to me what problem the Janet code solves but it's clearly not that 3SUM problem.
On the example input of
it outputs For what it's worth, here's some Common Lisp code that does solve the 3SUM problem in O(n^2). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3SUMhttps://janet-lang.org/1.9.1/docs/fibers/index.html
For bonus points, compiling to a stand-alone JavaScript wrapped in HTML would be awesome if it could be hosted on a Github page.
Obviously I understand most of the time someone wants to make a GUI they are not thinking about something like TIC-80. I agree a more complete GUI library would be nice.
But if nothing else it may be worth mentioning that TIC-80 is a fun and easy way to install and try Janet. Even the Android version comes with Janet and a built-in code editor. Just run "new janet" in the TIC-80 console and then press F1 (on Android TIC-80 by default uses its own virtual keyboard that has all the keys it needs) to open the code editor.
Similarly, they were supposed to offer "compile to HTML5", but it never really worked for me.
An opinion that flatly and individually labels every extant thing the same has no signal to it. I'm not sure what to make of your original post other than you're expressing displeasure at the universe for not handing you what you wanted and that you believe that expression should be injected into arbitrary discussion.
Should have phrased it as something along the lines of:
>This would be very interesting to me if it had support for a GUI library, and if it were then possible to compile to a stand-alone application which could be easily distributed.