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mikemee | 1 year ago

Another vote for s7. We successfully embedded it and SQLite as the (non graphics) engine for otherwise native apps on iOS and Android. Super fast. Great FFI. Reliable. Small. Huge benefits from shared code across our mobile apps, insanely fast unit tests and a clean set of tooling.

Ultimately we switched to Fennel as a more pragmatic Lisp for mobile. AFAIK we were alone using s7 on mobile whereas Lua especially is a common mobile extension. Partly also this reflected the state of r7rs Scheme compatibility. We were running Guile on the desktop for development while shipping s7 and subtle incompatibilities would bite us regularly (a fun one was parameter evaluation order).

Thumbs up to both s7 and fennel for their great projects and community.

discuss

supaflybanzai|1 year ago

Wow, so nice to hear some people actually experimenting with not just mainstream stuff.

Where do you work (if it is not a secret)?

mikemee|1 year ago

No secret. A little puzzle app company I’ve been running for a while: www.eggheadgames.com. No ads or gamification. Just classic paper magazine puzzles. Pay for more or subscribe for unlimited play.

As we’re small, rewriting the code over and over for cross-platform is costly. But as they’re games with words, we want a fully native experience for the highest quality app with great accessibility and full integration - as well as easier crash log debugging without intrusive 3rd party packages.

The classic solutions are either not native enough (Flutter), are graphics-based (Unity), too expensive to maintain the stack (React *), don’t integrate well with the native mobile tooling (Go, various ports of Python, Ruby, Lisps apart from s7) or also end up being a separate core but are harder to debug via crash logs (various JS, Kotlin or Swift cross platform).

Plus once we tried Lisp it was hard to go back! Succinct, fast, great editing. And yeah, it’s just fun to do something different. We also get a kick from being part of and contributing back to the Fennel community. It’s nice to mix some open source with commercial apps.