Blink

Blink is a lightweight Lisp dialect written in Rust, focused on power and extensibility, with a powerful REPL* and great developer experience. It supports closures, macros*, dynamic plugin loading, and native Rust interop—all in a simple, expressive syntax.
*coming soon

Features

• Closures with lexical scoping
• Special forms: def, fn, if, quote, do, let, and, or, try
• Native function registration (e.g. +, map, reduce)
• Plugin loading via .so libraries using native-import
• Line and column tracking for rich error reporting
• Readline-based REPL with multiline input and history
• Macros and module system (in progress)

Getting Started

1. Clone & Build

git clone https://github.com/yourname/blink.git
cd blink
cargo build --release

2. Run the REPL

cargo run

You’ll see:

Welcome to your blink REPL. Type 'exit' to quit.
λ>

Example session:

λ> (def x 42)
λ> (+ x 8)
=> 50

Plugin System

Build a Plugin

Each plugin lives in plugins/<name> and is a standalone Rust crate:

cd plugins/greeter
cargo build --release

This produces target/release/libgreeter.so.

Install the Plugin

Move the .so into the native/ directory:

mv target/release/libgreeter.so ../../native/

Then in Blink:

λ> (native-import "greeter")
=> "native-imported: greeter"

Project Structure

src/
├── main.rs              # Entry point (starts REPL)
├── repl.rs              # REPL loop
├── parser.rs            # Tokenizer & parser
├── eval.rs              # Evaluation engine
├── native_functions.rs  # Built-in Rust functions
├── env.rs               # Lexical environment
├── value.rs             # Lisp value types
├── error.rs             # Error types and reporting

License

Licensed under the MIT License.

Roadmap

See features.md for the full roadmap. Planned features include:

• Macros and code quoting
• Module system with namespaces
• Plugin scaffolding and install tools
• Async/actor-aware evaluation model
• Web DSL and server bindings