Rust but Lisp
Details
- External ID
- 48078575
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Rust but Lisp
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- May 9, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 218
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9709208400646203
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- developer tools and programming utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- lisp dialect in rust
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Creating a language that blends Lisp with Rust semantics requires specialized expertise in compiler construction, formal grammar, type systems, and Rust's borrow checker.
What it would actually take: The project requires a custom parser to convert S-expressions into an intermediate representation, followed by a transpiler or compiler backend generating Rust AST (`syn`/`quote`) or LLVM IR. The hard parts are correctly mapping Lisp dynamic and macro semantics onto Rust's strict static type system, ownership model, and lifetime constraints. This requires deep compiler engineering knowledge, formal type theory, and extensive familiarity with Rust compiler internals.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Fennel (Lisp-to-Lua), Carp (memory-safe Lisp), Dale (C with Lisp syntax), ELSA (Emacs Lisp type checker)
Concerns raised: Macros lack conditionals, not Turing-complete, Single-letter types assumed to be generic parameters, Code doesn't currently compile (span/Display issues), Manual memory management without GC adds complexity, Algebraic effects are implicit globals at scale
Feature requests: Compile to Go, Fix mobile website scrolling and responsive layout, Type-aware macros with declared type information, Garbage collection option instead of mandatory manual allocation
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 291 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #6 of 292 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 189 days after the earliest competitor.
- A Common Lisp implementation in development · hn · 2026-04-05 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- 18KB ls alternative in no_std rust and Libc · hn · 2026-07-15 · 23 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Rust compiler in PHP emitting x86-64 executables · hn · 2026-03-01 · 66 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Hybrid-Transpiler · hn · 2025-12-26 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- RustDesk-Suite · github · 2026-09-22 · 81 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Rust Database from Scratch · hn · 2026-05-20 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- HelixEdit · github · 2026-09-23 · 222 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Rust UEFI UI Lib · hn · 2026-03-31 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.52
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.