Why was LISP not one of the first languages able to compile to WASM? I've been curious ever since the awesome WASM project started tracking different projects. They use emojis for progress and LISP has been a hatching egg.
1. lack of native GC, you had to roll your own by providing a runtime.
2. lack of tail-call elimination in V1 of the spec. This essentially forces you to trampoline everything.
But lisp doesn't need TCO.
IMHO a Common Lisp without TCO is not a serious tool because I cannot write tail-recursive code with it.
The CL spec doesn't guarantee tail-call elimination, and most CL implementations don't guarantee it either (it could be on or off depending on the current optimization level). So most people don't bother relying on it.
[0]: https://webassemblyman.com/wat_webassembly_text_format.html
> Implementing Lisp onto WebAssembly is so obvious that you may wonder why somebody did not have this idea long ago.
I did find this on the Femto GitHub and got a chuckle. Yes, dear author, that is exactly the piece of information I want explained. Too funny.
It’s an S expression language though with some similarities to LISP