ABabecedarius·Feb 11, 2023
Reminds me of https://github.com/darius/ichbins/blob/master/ichbins.scm#L2... but written for a wider window, which helps in this style.
In Exploring the impact of code style in identifying good programmers (2022)darius
ichbins
C2010–2023
darius / ichbins
ichbins
A tiny self-hosting Lisp-to-C compiler
3Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
239GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A tiny self-hosting Lisp-to-C compiler
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year8 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2010-11-29 21:36:51 UTC to 2023-02-11 16:32:10 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
8 sourcesAn old go of mine at filling in that incompleteness in a minimal way: https://github.com/darius/ichbins
It went a little too minimal in having no comments.
In Lisp in a WeekendHere's the complete runtime of my garbage-collected self-hosting Lisp-to-C compiler: https://github.com/darius/ichbins/blob/master/ichbins.scm#L2...
(Yes, it's not the world's fastest.)
In Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)Self-hosing, haha. Not that I can think of. My https://github.com/darius/ichbins is shorter but it's a self-hosting Lisp compiling to C.
In C4 – C in 4 functionsI was doing something like that with https://github.com/darius/tinyhiss but it's really a toy and still far from freestanding.
https://github.com/darius/ichbins did get to the point of compiling itself, but it was a little too limited to make a good start on growing into a system I'd like to use.
In Bootstrapping a simple compiler from nothing (2001)Ichbins - Self-hosting Lisp-to-C compiler in 400 lines
2 points · Open discussionMy basic Lisp interpreter was six pages of C, but it's really not usable; it responds to almost any program error (including searching for nonexistent variables) by dumping core. http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2007-Septe...
Darius Bacon's https://github.com/darius/ichbins is a Lisp-to-C compiler written in itself. It includes an interpreter written in C to bootstrap it — ten pages: https://github.com/darius/ichbins/blob/master/boot-terp/lump... — but the actual compiler is only six pages of Lisp.
My somewhat more performant (but less complete) Scheme-subset-to-assembly compiler is more like 30 pages: http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/sw/urscheme/
If your desert-island language is the one in which bootstrapping your high-level language of choice is the easiest, it seems like you'd probably be better off with Haskell or ML
Read the rest
.
Self-hosting Lisp-to-C compiler in 384 lines of Lisp
66 points · Open discussion