Home

Maru is a lisp dialect created by Ian Piumarta, see the project home for more details. There's a concise page about its semantics here on this wiki for people already familiar with lisp.

Plans

• Make maru easier to approach by restructuring the code and the build process.
• Set up automated tests.
• Set up infrastructure for automatic bootstrapping through multiple stages of the compiler when new features are introduced. Details at the Build infrastructure for bootstrapping page.
• Write a parser for NASM's x86 instruction DSL and use that instead of the one checked into the repo currently.
• Embed osdefs.k into the executable.

Other interesting projects

• Porting maru to ARM and booting it on this: http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/FST-01 (an ARM computer as a tiny usb stick). Ultimately to replace/port projects like gnuk, a PGP smartcard (http://www.fsij.org/gnuk/).

Bootstrap

• Bootstrap from C
• Bootstrap from Common Lisp

Issues

• The following files are, probably accidentally, not checked in into the official mercurial repo:
  • test-eval.l
  • maru-nfibs.k
  • test2.c
  • maru-test2.k
  • maru-test3.k
  • boot-emit.l
  • irgol.k
  • cpp.g
• text-parser.l requires string_compare and it's commented out in eval3.c, and = doesn't support offset and length. What would be a solution? Implement string_compare in boot.l? That's not obvious, because string internals are not exposed. Or rewrite text-parser to use e.g. substrings? But there's not supstring primitive in eval3.c either.

Cooperation

• maru-dev google group

Interesting related stuff

• Fexpr the Ultimate Lambda (article)
• maru bootstrap from common lisp, with a few interesting notes:
  • about decode
  • a bigger maru.txt
• scheme2llvm, a simple scheme implementation based on LLVM
• Languages as libraries (paper, PDF)
• Honu: syntactic extension for algebraic notation through enforestation (paper)
• boot-eval.c maru notes