"Pixie - A Lightweight Lisp with 'Magical' Powers" by Timothy Baldridge

This will be an overview of the Pixie programming language. We will start with a few words about the niche that Pixie is trying to fill and then move on to the main features of the language, including: excellent C interop, immutable data structures, lightning-fast startup times, "good-enough" execution performance, and async-by-default io. We will also touch briefly on the technology (RPython) that has enabled Pixie to grow from nothing to a usable language in less than a year, and yet still support the major *nix OSes as well as run on x86 and ARM.
Timothy Baldridge
COGNITECT
@timbaldridge
Timothy is a developer with Cognitect Inc. He hails from the mountain regions of Denver Colorado (USA). Timothy is a polyglot programmer with experience in Clojure, C#, Python, and Erlang. He's the author of the Pixie Language and Clojure's core.async 'go' macro.

[@boriskourt]

I absolutely love the way it works with C code. This is an amazing effort!

[@Calm_Energy]

What a cool project. Try saying "double polymorphic function" ten times fast. I especially liked learning the history of attempts to create tracing jits. Starting with mozilla's "trace monkey" and then python's Psycho!

[@SimonClarkstone]

The output of those trig functions was wrong AFAICT; it looks a bit like int bit patterns were being interpreted as floats by the functions.

[@robinmattheussen2395]

"excellent C interop, immutable data structures, lightning-fast startup times, "good-enough" execution performance, and async-by-default io"
On one hand, this looks like a really, really neat project (though it seems worked has stopped on it since I first learned about it). On the other hand, couldn't you spend time developing an immutable data structure library for Common Lisp instead? SBCL has pretty fast startup times and great performance, CFFI is pretty good, and async io is now a possibility in CL. So it just lacks modern immutable data structures (though maybe somebody already implemented that?). Why develop another Lisp? Aside from it being probably being a lot of fun I mean.

[@softwave1662]

This is one of the more exciting new languages I know of - I will definitely play with it.

[@FernandoBasso]

Great stuff! :)

[@souenzzo]

It's a suitable lisp for "number crunching"?!!!??!???!??!!

[@shipper66]

I hope i will be able to use pixie to write some neovim plugins.