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arXiv:2310.13589cs.PL

A R4RS Compliant REPL in 7 KB

Léonard Oest O'Leary, Mathis Laroche, Marc Feeley

Abstract

The Ribbit system is a compact Scheme implementation running on the Ribbit Virtual Machine (RVM) that has been ported to a dozen host languages. It supports a simple Foreign Function Interface (FFI) allowing extensions to the RVM directly from the program's source code. We have extended the system to offer conformance to the R4RS standard while staying as compact as possible. This leads to a R4RS compliant REPL that fits in an 7 KB Linux executable. This paper explains the various issues encountered and our solutions to make, arguably, the smallest R4RS conformant Scheme implementation of all time.

arXiv comments
Presented at The 2023 Scheme and Functional Programming Workshop (arXiv:cs/0101200)
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.PLProgramming Languages

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Linked by 2 identifiable commenters in 3 comments across 3 threads, from Sep 2024 to Sep 2026. Found in 1 HN submission from Nov 2023 to Nov 2023. Open submission discussions.

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Discussed in comments3 threads

  1. LispBM is a concurrent Lisp for microcontrollers with message passing 1 comment

    • Here is another tiny and highly portable Scheme that I submitted along with this: https://github.com/udem-dlteam/ribbit https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13589 Ribbit: A portable, compact and extensible Scheme implementation to 25 targets. R4RS compliant.…

      so-cal-schemerView on HNParent context

  2. Ribbit: A Small Scheme VM, Compiler and REPL in 4K (2021) [video] 1 comment

    • Compact language implementations are increasingly popular for use in resource constrained environments. For embedded applications such as robotics and home automation, it is useful to support a Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL) so that a basic level of interactive development is…

      so-cal-schemerView on HNParent context

  3. Ribbit: A portable, compact and extensible R4RS Scheme implementation 1 comment

    • Hi! One of the authors of Ribbit here (@leo-ard). One of our goals was to reduce as much as possible a R4RS compliant REPL, because it is quite reasonably sized and doesn't support macros (we managed to fit it in 6.5KB!). We considered R7RS, but it was a bit too ambitious for a…

      leonardoolView on HNParent context

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