Building a Lisp-like Language from Scratch in Rust

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This post delves into building an interpreter for a Lisp-like language using Rust. No knowledge beyond Rust basics is required to follow this post.

Inspiration and Project Overview

Inspired by Stepan Parunashvili’s article Risp (in (Rust) (Lisp)), I created lip, an interpreted language designed for logical operations with a Lisp-like syntax. This supports logical operations (not, and, or), branching (if expression), lambda functions, and variable definition.

This post guides you through the process of building an interpreter, focusing on the core functionalities of tokenizing, parsing, and evaluating expressions. While it may sound complex, the process only requires basic Rust knowledge. The language we’ll build is lp, a distilled version of lip designed for illustration. The live demo of an lp interpreter is accessible via a browser, and the complete code is available on GitHub.

Lisp on Momori Nakano

Building a Lisp-like Language from Scratch in Rust

Inspiration and Project Overview