TOtosh·Feb 28, 2026Submission
1 points · Open discussionkiselgra
c-mera
Common Lisp2016–2026
kiselgra / c-mera
c-mera
Next-level syntax for C-like languages :)
9Distinct people
12Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
456GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Next-level syntax for C-like languages :)
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
- eudoxia0/cmacro · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 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 year12 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-05-13 11:02:21 UTC to 2026-02-28 18:25:07 UTC.
* 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
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 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 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
12 sourcesSee also (kinda, maybe) c-mera: https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera
In The Pre-Scheme RestorationCouple of others:
c-mera: https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera
cmacro: https://github.com/eudoxia0/cmacro
(This one one is implemented in Common Lisp for its semantics, but doesn't use a S-exp surface syntax for the code.)
sxc: https://github.com/burtonsamograd/sxc
(incomplete)
MetaC: https://github.com/mcallester/MetaC
(References Lisp in readme; doesn't use it for implementation or notation, but references ideas. Source code seems to be a core of .c files, and the rest self-hosted in its own .mc language. Somehow provides a REPL.)
In Cwerg: C-like language that can be implemented in 10kLOC"More of a lisp" -> "Fewer of the requirements that make Lisp are incorrect or missing"
E.g. a S-exp-ified version of C is "more of a Lisp" than standard C, like:
https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera
In SBCL: New in Version 2.2.1That's a Lisp preprocessor for a non-Lisp language.
If you program in C using the Common Lisp c-mera preprocessor, or any of the other similar systems, it's the same thing.
You're writing everything in S-exps, and the expansions use conses, but the output is C; so that of course that cannot call cons at run time.
https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera
In Carp – A statically typed Lisp, without a GC, for real-time applicationsSome well-known existing work in this exact area:
https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera
https://github.com/eudoxia0/cmacro (Written in Common Lisp, doesn't use S-exp syntax)
https://github.com/tomhrr/dale (Prev disc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14079573)
Newer stuff:
https://github.com/saman-pasha/lcc (No mention of meta-programming)
Lesser known:
https://github.com/deplinenoise/c-amplify (No docs, no update since 2010)
In Cakelisp: A Programming Language for GamesA quick Google search gave quite a bit of results e.g. C-Mera [1].
[1] https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera
In Why I’m Using CC-mera – Lisp syntax with C semantics
59 points · Open discussion> Features I want are: * pythonic indent * no trailing semicolon
I would recommend against making up a completely new syntax, since there would be no support in any existing tools (parsers, linters, IDEs, formatters, ...). Instead, I'd suggest picking a general-purpose syntax with the properties you want (indentation for grouping, newlines for sequencing). One excellent example is called "sweet-expressions", which was originally invented for Scheme but can actually be used to represent any structured data (especially code):
https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-110
You can use tools like "sweeten" and "unsweeten" from https://sourceforge.net/projects/readable/files to convert between sweet-expressions and s-expressions. S-expressions are just raw syntax trees, so "unsweeten" is basically a ready-made parser which you can pipe into any other prog
Read the rest
ram you like, e.g. linters, macro expanders, pretty-printers, etc.
To make your language compile to C, you would need some way to "render" those syntax trees into C code. There are existing tools to do this, for example the C-Mera system can read in C syntax trees and write out C code https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera
Your preprocessor could then be as simple as `unsweeten | cm c`
To add completely new features like immutable strings you would just need to define some representation for them in the syntax trees (or, if you want to make them the default for "double quotes" you should define an alternative representation for non-immutable strings), then write some find/replace macros to convert occurrences of this representation into an equivalent (but more verbose and elaborate) set of C syntax trees. Stick this find/replace step in between `unsweeten` and `cm` and you've got brand new syntax for very little work.
Show HN: Compiler using Lisp’s macro system for metaprogramming C-like languages
80 points · Open discussionWhy isn't it written in Lisp? It would be so much easier...
See for example C-MERA:
https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera
In Dale – A Lisp-flavoured CC-Mera[0] is also worth looking at. It's a Lisp-to-C-like source-to-source compiler. They're doing pretty neat stuff with that wrt. high-performance graphics[1]. On this year's European Lisp Symposium there was a demonstration of using this to generate and simultaneously test a graphics filter on many different architectures with many different optimizations to determine which works best on what. The video of the talk should be available next week.
[0] - https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera
[1] - https://github.com/kiselgra/cm-fop
In LispY C