The primary maintainer of Fennel, Phil Hagelberg, has put together some brief instructions on how to get Fennel running inside of Powder Toy for you :) https://p.hagelb.org/hello-powdertoy.fnl.html

Yup, same author! Although to my knowledge Calvin has mostly stepped away from the Fennel project at this point. It is primarily maintained by the same dev that made Clojure's Leiningen, technomancy.

I got nothing but respect for technomancy.

If you're interested in discussing further, there is a growing community that hangs out on #fennel on the Libera Chat IRC server. You can connect via matrix chat using https://matrix.to/#/!rnpLWzzTijEUDhhtjW:matrix.org I'll be hanging out there all day today and I'd love to talk about Fennel. There is also a Fennel User Group meeting this Saturday at 10am, open to all. More info at https://fennel-lang.org/events

I’ll also add that Fennel fixes some of things about Lua most people dislike, like the global variables by default thing. IMO it’s worth checking out even if you didn’t like Lua at first

Not sure when you used Lua but there is a package manager called LuaRocks now which has some pretty nice packages in it for many purposes. I don't think it'd be too hard to get Lua running inside of a Python env either :)

https://luarocks.org/

It's really pretty rough compared to everything else I've used. I really don't feel like luarocks solves very many of my problems. A lot of gaps in there, or libraries that only target 5.1, or only luajit. Or are completely unmaintained, or have poorly documented dependencies on C libraries. etc etc.

I use lua a lot and like it fine but the build/dependency/tooling situation is a fucking mess. It exposes you to a lot of the inconvenience of C in the end.

Yeah, my experience is limited mostly to web dev, via OpenResty, and game dev, via love2d.

The Lua libraries in these areas are very well maintained.

That said 90% of the time libraries ship as a single lua file and it’s often better to copy and paste it into your project. I have a modified version of lume I like to use floating around :)

This spartan approach to libraries is a strength of Lua.

Furthermore, you are likely to encounter three different libraries that partially implement your desired feature set.

Hi there! Once you have lua running somewhere you're 90% of the way there. You can do AOT compilation which will output lua code via.

fennel -c my-fennel-code.fnl

Or you can use the lua package api to automatically load .fnl files via require seamlessly:

local fennel = require("fennel") table.insert(package.loaders or package.searchers, fennel.searcher)

Enjoy!

Cross platform, portable lisp that compiles to Lua. It's very fast, usable everywhere, and has a large open source ecosystem thanks to the maturity of Lua.