Fennel

Fennel^[1] is a Lisp-like programming language that compiles to Lua.

Some developers, for example, write games in Fennel that target the Lua-based Love2d framework^[2].

Install

Run the following command:

sudo apt install fennel

For comparison, take the following example code from the Lua guide:

local function greet(name)
  local msg = "Hello, " .. name .. "!"
  return msg
end

print(greet("world"))

Create the following hello.fnl file:

(fn greet [name]
  (let [msg (.. "Hello, " name "!")]
    msg))

(print (greet "world"))

Then compile to Lua with fennel --compile hello.fnl, which should print:

local function greet(name)
  local msg = ("Hello, " .. name .. "!")
  return msg
end
return print(greet("world"))

As you can see, the original Lua code and the generated code are essentially equivalent.

To run the code directly, use:

fennel hello.fnl