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Comment by tekknolagi | Hacker News Reader

Oh cool, someone else besides me posted my blog :D

I'm the author and here to answer questions and take constructive criticism.

If you want to comment but don't have an HN account, please check out the mailing list: https://lists.sr.ht/~max/compiling-lisp

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I love seeing long form blog posts like this! Whilst its not something I’d personally do for a long time, its great to have resources on the web that go into detail in advanced topics like building a lisp interpreter.

From another lisper, congrats and well done!

I agree that I really enjoy reading in-depth blog post series, but after releasing a 3-part series myself, I'm not sure if I would do it again. Each subsequent post got about 1/3 the views of the previous one, and wow does it take sooo much more effort to write than a one-off post!

This one is great though. I just every few days for the next post!

You're right, it is a lot of effort! I made myself a promise that I wouldn't sprint through the first couple and then fall off a cliff on the rest. That's been a failing of mine in the past.

Progress is currently regular-ish because I've already implemented this stuff before I started writing. Once we get to labels and label calls, though, there very well could be a significant slowdown. I haven't figured out how to do that properly!

I'm glad you like the series and I'm very flattered that you posted it.

I am following the "Compiling a Lisp" series, its great, please keep posting, and thanks for your effort.

Indeed, these things take a lot of effort and views / feedback isn’t great.

Unfortunately the internet has moved towards short form, rehashing simple concepts and clickbait titles - there’s so much junk online, and the signal to noise ratio is high.

But people are gaming for most interaction, views, etc and attention spans are shorter. So this is the world we live in

Is there a reason you treat the arithmetic operators specially in your reader? Non-lisps do so as they are infix operators, but most lisps treat them the same as any other identifier.

I don't think I treat them any differently in my reader. They are part of the set of "symbol characters". I do special case + and - prefixed integers, though.

Right, just read some logic backwards flipping through that code.

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