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> If your dependency set is massive, you should probably have an extensive feature set.

Assuming that having a huge feature set is a desirable quality. Sometimes minimalism is a useful goal in itself - languages with few features usually make those features composable, leading to a combinatorial explosion of the ways those features can be used.

That being said, a small independent compiler/interpreter for PicoLisp would still be nice, though.

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A minimal set of composable features is by far my preference for language design, hence reading about PicoLisp. I suppose a large and complicated set of dependencies could form the foundation for a minimal language - something like building a Forth on the JVM - but somehow that feels wrong. Misapplied priors in my reasoning perhaps.

The picolisp language doesn't differ between the custom assembly language implementation, the llvm implementation pil21 or the Java implementation Ersatz. Saying that picolisp has become less minimalistic because one implementation has a library attached which you think is heavy weight makes me think you misunderstood something important somewhere.

I was missing that there are implementations other than the llvm one, just went looking and found https://software-lab.de/doc64/README which I am delighted by, thank you for the hint!

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