I really enjoyed episode 30 of Libre Lounge where Serge Wroclawski interviewed Phil Hagelberg about his language Fennel, which is a Lisp that runs on Lua runtimes.

I'm not very familiar with Lua so it was interesting to hear that the reference implementation is only 200 kilobytes. I also like the idea that Lua is “relentlessly simple” with only a table as a data structure. The fact that you have to invent your own object system (if you want it), reminds me of Perl.

They also talked a fair amount about Clojure. It's not often that features such as immutability in Clojure are questioned. On thing that struck me is the criticism of terrible startup time for Clojure on the JVM. It make me wonder if Fennel on the JVM also has a terrible startup time. Recently I was playing around with GraalVM as as optional part of Quarkus and I was very impressed with the startup time. I have no idea if these tricks can work with Lua or Fennel on the JVM.