I've had a bit of a poke at mal and it's actually feeling like it's a real thing.

I've got a few things I could do next, it needs a better UI for the repl, I could build it again in JS (to run here in the frontend), I could build it again in C and compile to wasm (to get exactly the same code running front and back), and I could handle mal code blocks with the C# engine.

The cli needs readline like stuff - at least basic cursor movement. Ideally, it would stash the environment (and history) at exit and load again at start, with some way of editing (i.e., save to mal code).

Rewriting in C would probably be a bugger, although there's always Crafting Interpreters to fall back on (it's got dynamic lists, rough polymorphism, even a garbage collector!).

Rewriting in JS would be easier, and I could use quickJS to run/test on the server (which is mildly horrific, but that's life in 2022 baby!), but I'm still on the fence about JS. It's nice that there's common language in browsers, but did it have to be that one?)

I'll have a stab at writing in C, trying to use as little libc as I can get away with (realloc, printf, probably some string comparison stuff, I'll check the book later) and see if that's a realistic option.

(I'm going to end up with Lisp interpreted by wasm calling out to JavaScript for IO. Groovy.)