tré metamorphic Lisp compiler

tré compiles a Common Lisp-inspired dialect of the Lisp programming language to either JS, PHP or Common Lisp to build itself to run on top of Steel Bank Common Lisp. It brings the power of Lisp to the cheapest of web servers. Mostly LAMP ones. tré does not just provide a funny syntax required to unleash the super-powers of Lisp macro expansion. It is a compiler, perfectly able to generate C, bytecode and assembly with only few extra lines of code.

After a Corona break, tré's development is being continued alongside TUNIX Lisp for small systems. The focus is on integrating JSON data, a new kind of Object Relation Mapper to get around the pains of SQL database programming, a unified object system, a completed Lisp Markup Language implementation, and type inference.

Within 18 months computational power doubles in general. What once took tré ten minutes to compile now takes ten seconds, so tré is not designed for raging performance. tré is a micro-pass compiler that is rather easy to maintain but still could use a lot of cleaning up. Feel free to join to make it simpler.

Please be aware that debugging generated JS and PHP code can be a major pain in the backplate. A PHP debugger setup is highly recommended unless you're made to debug with wits exclusively. Developers who are into Test Driven Development though should be pretty comfortable and also find value in tré.

Table of Contents

1. Contributors
2. Build and install
3. FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions
4. Introduction to Lisp
5. Starting a Project
6. Syntax
7. Class
8. Porting from PHP
9. Compiler
10. Compiler source docs
11. Environment
12. Modules
13. Stuff using tré
14. Wishlist

Build and install

Prerequisites

tré requires SBCL and Git. You require basic knowledge of Common LISP, PHP and JavaScript.

To install the required packages on Ubuntu or derivates run:

sudo apt install sbcl git -y

Running 'make.sh'

Shell script "make.sh" is the makefile for tre with several actions you can list by specifying target "help".

./make.sh help

To build and install just do:

./make.sh boot
./make.sh install

This will build and install executable "tre" to /usr/local/bin/ and all other files to /usr/local/. TODO: environment var "PREFIX" to change the destination directory. It takes an optional pathname of a source file to compile and execute. If no file was specified, it'll prompt you for expressions to execute.

VIM syntax file

While booting the environment tré generates a syntax file for VIM named 'tre.vim' which you can copy to ~/.vim/after/syntax/. It extends the already existing syntax highlighting rules for Lisp code by everything that's been defined in environment/.