uLisp - A Lisp compiler to RISC-V written in Lisp

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2024-10-11 12:00:04

This is a simple experimental Lisp compiler, written in uLisp, that will compile a Lisp function into RISC-V machine code. You can run the compiler on the RISC-V core of a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 (or another RP2350-based board):

When I added the facility of executing machine code to uLisp I had in mind the eventual goal of being able to compile uLisp functions into machine code, and this is a first step in that direction.

The nice thing about compiling Lisp is that you don't have to write a tokeniser or parser, because Lisp programs are already in a consistent structure that can be processed by another Lisp program.

The compiler program is written in the subset of Common Lisp supported by uLisp, and will run on the RISC-V core of a RP2350-based board; I used a Raspberry Pi Pico 2. You can also run it using Common Lisp on a laptop or desktop computer, and display the code it generates, but of course you won't be able to run the RISC-V machine code because Common Lisp doesn't have uLisp's defcode command.

I got my initial inspiration for this compiler from Peter Norvig's book "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" [1].