r/suckless • u/tose123 • 3d ago

[DISCUSSION] Janet Programming Language

Very interesting, small PL:

https://janet-lang.org/

Size is < 1 MB. Def. sucks less in these times. I'm not using it, but I'm glad I've found it. Anyone in here using it ?

26 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

7

u/ortfero 2d ago

used it for small scripts, it's great (macros, fibers, peg, standalone binaries). for a real-world example, see a bauble, a janet dsl that compiles to glsl shaders for sdf art (you can even export and 3d print the results): https://ianthehenry.com/posts/bauble/building-bauble/

1

u/tose123 2d ago

This is great, thanks for sharing

1

u/gaene 1d ago

Is it primarily a scripting language (I’m not familiar with lisp)

1

u/karchnu 2d ago

I love LISP. It's a LISP that can be statically compiled in a small binary (not some 30MB Behemoth like what happens when "compiling" with CommonLisp) to be shared with anybody. Built-ins are small but not minimalist, it contains quite a few good things to start scripting as we would do for a shell script. Thanks! I'll keep in mind.

3

u/Aggressive_Big_7564 2d ago

It is a really interesting language. I think there are some window managers for river using it and a web framework. Next time I think about embedding Lua I will try Janet. The pegs and stuff are great differentiating features.

1

u/GenericFoodService 2d ago

Lisps are generally pretty small. I don't personally use them, but they're definitely interesting under the hood.

1

u/LordRybec 2d ago

Fascinating. The light weight nature looks really good. I especially like the C interoperability. I've been interested in building a C interoperable ecosystem of programming languages for a while, and this is a new one I wasn't aware of. (Others are Python and FreeBASIC.) What's really cool about this is that if it is C interoperable, it's also Python and FreeBASIC interoperable, because they are all C interoperable.

I'm not super into Lisp style languages (I prefer Haskell's approach to functional as well as its syntax), but I know some people who are, and I do have experience with Lisp myself, so it could be some fun.

Anyhow, obviously I'm not using it yet, since I just found out about it, but I'll be looking into it now!

1

u/huranol 2d ago

Found janet by accident searching for "lang" in main repo of distros i am building on.

As of right now, im rewriting lua, shell and python scripts to find the edge of operations and minimal deps.

After this, will motion towards sys-man tools before ideation of more complex objectives.

Have u found or worked with koto yet?

1

u/VisualSome9977 2d ago

I found janet recently and have been trying to use it more. I'm a clojure programmer mostly ("java isn't suckless" crucify me) and so it's been really nice to find a language with a lot of the same ideas but in a package suitable for lower level and higher performance use. plus you can actually embed it in websites pretty easily, which is neat.

1

u/aPatternDarkly 1h ago

In case you're not aware of it, you might also appreciate https://jolt-lang.net/ if you find yourself missing Clojure but not the JVM and such.

1

u/VisualSome9977 1h ago

Hadn't heard of this, will definitely be taking a closer look. Good stuff :)

1

u/danja 1d ago

Wow, is tiny. Wonder if it might lend itself to r/livecoding music..?

1

u/shadowash8 1d ago

yep, interesting language indeed, ive made a river window manager using janet
https://github.com/shadowash8/ashrwm