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kanaka
mal
Assembly2015–2026
kanaka / mal

mal

mal - Make a Lisp

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REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

mal - Make a Lisp

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

A few weeks ago, I went through "Make a Lisp" [1] using C#. It only took a few days to get to a pretty useful implementation. I "cheated" quite a bit using the existing C#…

kgwxd used a recommendation phrase. 5 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

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Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 6:01:32 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 year128 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-02-27 21:23:48 UTC to 2026-07-17 16:20:25 UTC.

051015202015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 18 mentions; 1 submissions, 17 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 2 submissions, 5 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 19 mentions; 2 submissions, 17 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 2 submissions, 4 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 2 submissions, 9 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 0 submissions, 15 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 17 mentions; 2 submissions, 15 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 0 submissions, 15 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 1 submissions, 6 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC18117
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC725
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC19217
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC624
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1129
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15015
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC17215
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15015
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC716
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 12, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
mal - Make a Lisp Description 1. Mal is a Clojure inspired Lisp interpreter 2. Mal is a learning tool Each implementation of mal is separated into 11 incremental, self-contained (and testable) steps that demonstrate core concepts of Lisp. The last step is capable of self-hosting (running the mal implementation of mal). See the make-a-lisp process guide. The make-a-lisp steps are: step0_repl step1_read_print step2_eval step3_env step4_if_fn_do step5_tco step6_file step7_quote step8_macros step9_try stepA_mal Each make-a-lisp step has an associated architectural diagram. That elements that are new for that step are highlighted in red. Here is the final architecture once step A is complete: If you are interested in creating a mal implementation (or just interested in using mal for something) you are welcome to to join our Discord. In addition to the make-a-lisp process guide there is also a mal/make-a-lisp FAQ where I attempt to answer some common questions. 3. Mal is implemented in 89 languages (95 different implementations and 118 runtime modes) Language Creator Ada Chris Moore Ada #2 Nicolas Boulenguez GNU Awk Mitsuru Kariya Bash 4 Joel Martin BASIC (C64 & QBasic) Joel Martin BBC BASIC V Ben Harris C Joel Martin C #2 Duncan Watts C++ Stephen Thirlwall C# Joel Martin ChucK Vasilij Schneidermann Clojure (Clojure & ClojureScript) Joel Martin CoffeeScript Joel Martin Common Lisp Iqbal Ansari Crystal Linda_pp D Dov Murik Dart Harry Terkelsen Elixir Martin Ek Elm Jos van Bakel Emacs Lisp Vasilij Schneidermann Erlang Nathan Fiedler ES6 (ECMAScript 2015) Joel Martin F# Peter Stephens Factor Jordan Lewis Fantom Dov Murik Fennel sogaiu Forth Chris Houser GNU Guile Mu Lei GNU Smalltalk Vasilij Schneidermann Go Joel Martin Groovy Joel Martin Hare Lou Woell Haskell Joel Martin Haxe (Neko, Python, C++, & JS) Joel Martin Hy Joel Martin Io Dov Murik Janet sogaiu Java Joel Martin Java Truffle (Truffle/GraalVM) Matt McGill JavaScript (Demo) Joel Martin jq Ali MohammadPur Julia Joel Martin Kotlin Javier Fernandez-Ivern LaTeX3 Nicolas Boulenguez LiveScript Jos van Bakel Logo Dov Murik Lua Joel Martin GNU Make Joel Martin mal itself Joel Martin MATLAB (GNU Octave & MATLAB) Joel Martin miniMAL (Repo, Demo) Joel Martin NASM Ben Dudson Nim Dennis Felsing Object Pascal Joel Martin Objective C Joel Martin OCaml Chris Houser Perl Joel Martin Perl 6 Hinrik Örn Sigurðsson PHP Joel Martin Picolisp Vasilij Schneidermann Pike Dov Murik PL/pgSQL (PostgreSQL) Joel Martin PL/SQL (Oracle) Joel Martin PostScript Joel Martin PowerShell Joel Martin Prolog Nicolas Boulenguez PureScript mrsekut Python2 Joel Martin Python3 Gavin Lewis RPython Joel Martin R Joel Martin Racket Joel Martin Rexx Dov Murik Ruby Joel Martin Ruby #2 Ryan Cook Rust Joel Martin Scala Joel Martin Scheme (R7RS) Vasilij Schneidermann Skew Dov Murik Standard ML Fabian Bergström Swift 3 Joel Martin Swift 4 陆遥 Swift 6 Oleg Montak Tcl Dov Murik TypeScript Masahiro Wakame Vala Simon Tatham VHDL Dov Murik Vimscript Dov Murik Visual Basic.NET Joel Martin Visual Basic Script 刘百超 WebAssembly (wasm) Joel Martin Wren Dov Murik XSLT Ali MohammadPur Yorick Dov Murik Zig Josh Tobin Presentations Mal was presented publicly for the first time in a lightning talk at Clojure West 2014 (unfortunately there is no video). See examples/clojurewest2014.mal for the presentation that was given at the conference (yes, the presentation is a mal program). At Midwest.io 2015, Joel Martin gave a presentation on Mal titled "Achievement Unlocked: A Better Path to Language Learning". Video, Slides. More recently Joel gave a presentation on "Make Your Own Lisp Interpreter in 10 Incremental Steps" at LambdaConf 2016: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Slides. Building/running implementations The simplest way to run any given implementation is to use docker. Every implementation has a docker image pre-built with language dependencies installed. You can launch the REPL using a convenient target in the top level Makefile (where IMPL is the implementation directory name and stepX is the step to run): make DOCKERIZE=1 "repl^IMPL^stepX" # OR stepA is the default step: make DOCKERIZE=1 "repl^IMPL" External / Alternate Implementations The following implementations are maintained as separate projects: HolyC by Alexander Bagnalla Rust by Tim Morgan by vi - using Pest grammar, not using typical Mal infrastructure (cargo-ized steps and built-in converted tests). Swift 2 by Keith Rollin - This implementation used to be in the repo. However, Swift 2 is no longer easily buildable/testable. Q by Ali Mohammad Pur - The Q implementation works fine but it requires a proprietary manual download that can't be Dockerized (or integrated into the mal CI pipeline) so for now it remains a separate project. Other mal Projects malc - Mal (Make A Lisp) compiler. Compiles a Mal program to LLVM assembly language, then binary. malcc - malcc is an incremental compiler implementation for the Mal language. It uses the Tiny C Compiler as the compiler backend and has full support for the Mal language, including macros, tail-call elimination, and even run-time eval. "I Built a Lisp Compiler" post about the process. frock - Clojure-flavoured PHP. Uses mal/php to run programs. flk - A LISP that runs wherever Bash is glisp - Self-bootstrapping graphic design tool on Lisp. Live Demo mal2py-compiler - MAL-to-Python. A fork of the python3 implementation that compiles mal to python with a 16x performance improvement on the perf3 synthetic benchmark. Implementation Details Ada The Ada implementation was developed with GNAT 4.9 on debian. It also compiles unchanged on windows if you have windows versions of git, GNAT and (optionally) make. There are no external dependencies (readline not implemented). cd impls/ada make ./stepX
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

18 sources
cromo·Sep 15, 2015
This reminds me of MAL [1], which stands for "Make A Lisp" or Make, A Lisp" depending on whether you're talking about the whole project or just the make version. It branched out into being implementations of a lisp in over two dozen languages, with instructions to help in writing your own. I was working on a haxe version before my motherboard recently bit the dust. [1] https://github.com/kanaka/mal
In Lisp implementation in GNU make
igravious·Jun 22, 2015
What is always missing for me in these lists is a tutorial for knocking together a small lambda calculus + dependently typed interpreter in C. Not ML, Not Ocaml, not, Haskell, not any language that has _already_ got lambdas in it! Always when I read these I see, "get your Haskell compiler and..." and I'm like, if I knew Haskell well enough to do that I wouldn't be doing this tutorial in the first place. Case in point, article says "particularly for programming pracitioners who didn’t learn it at school." -- Correct! I taught myself Basic, I taught myself a bit of x86 assembler, most importantly, I taught myself C. My working mental model of a computer is the C machine model. And even now, now that I know Ruby with its lambdas, I know that Ruby is written in C. And the Linux kernel. And Nginx (C++ maybe? Dunno). And on, and on. Show me th
Read the rest
e tutorial where I can build, _in C_ a bare bones working (tail recursion) implementation of the lambda calculus with type inference and dependent (algebraic?) types and I'll shake your hand and call you a champion. Closest I've seen is Make A Lisp - https://github.com/kanaka/mal but I don't think it has the sweet types and tail recursion and other good stuff. PS: bonus points if Regexen are native type :) (Open to suggestions (I am))
In A Path to Enlightenment in Programming Language Theory
falcolas·May 30, 2015
https://github.com/kanaka/mal This is more than a weekend's worth of work, but the work is incremental, so you will see benefits from point 0. This was a lot of fun for me, and it helped shine light on some of the darker corners of Go. I'm still working on a version of it myself, using it to experiment with different coding styles, interfaces, and libraries. A lot of fun.
In Ask HN: Golang weekend project idea

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