Element 0 is a Lisp dialect implemented in the Zig programming language. It is inspired by Scheme and aims to be compliant with the R5RS standard to a large extent. The main goal of Element 0 is to provide a lightweight, embeddable Lisp interpreter (named elz) that can be easily integrated into Zig applications as a scripting engine, as well as a standalone interactive read-eval-print-loop (REPL). Additionally, it comes with a foreign function interface (FFI) API that lets you call Zig procedures from Lisp code and vice versa.

Features

• R5RS-ish: Aims for a good level of R5RS compliance.
• Embeddable: Easy to integrate into Zig projects as Zig library.
• FFI: Allows calling Zig functions from Lisp and vice versa.
• Garbage Collection: Uses the Boehm-Demers-Weiser garbage collector.
• REPL: Comes with REPL for scripting and development.

See the ROADMAP.md for the list of implemented and planned features.

IMPORTANT Element 0 is in early development, so bugs and breaking changes are expected. Please use the issues page to report bugs or request features.

Getting Started

Element 0 is implemented in Zig 0.14.1 and needs at least Zig 0.14.1 to build.

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/habedi/element-0.git
   cd element-0
   

2. Build and run the REPL:

   zig build repl
   

Documentation

You can find the full API documentation for the latest release of Element 0 here.

Alternatively, you can use the make docs command to generate the API documentation for the current version of Element 0 from the source code. This will generate HTML documentation in the docs/api directory, which you can serve locally with make serve-docs and view in your web browser at http://localhost:8000.

Examples

Check out the examples directory for various usage examples, including both Element 0 code and Zig FFI examples.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for details on how to make a contribution.

License

Element 0 is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (see LICENSE).

Acknowledgements

• The logo is made by Conrad Barski, M.D. with a few changes.
• This project uses linenoise and bdwgc C libraries.
• This project uses Chilli CLI framework.