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no-defun-allowed / dbyol.org
Last active August 6, 2025 13:35
Don't Build Your Own Lisp

Don’t Build Your Own Lisp

I feel somewhat pressed to give a negative review of this book. This comes from someone who has worked on various Lisp implementations, and written some amount of C, but that isn’t an excuse to be overly harsh. This book, however, does not provide many nice things to say, and plenty of un-nice things. My apologies in advance.

First off: God help you if you are going to write your first interpreter in C of all things. No one I know thinks it’s a good idea to start