Carp—A Language for the 21st Century – Veit Heller

Veit Heller introduces Carp, a statically typed, compiled Lisp with a borrow checker for safe memory management and C interoperability.

We love Clojure because it is expressive, modern, and built on the shoulders of giants. We love it because it enables us to create abstractions that we couldn’t otherwise get when constrained to the JVM and JavaScript world. Carp is a statically typed, compiled Lisp that’s deeply rooted in Clojure. It also takes inspirations from Rust, in that it uses a borrow checker to manage memory. This allows us to create a powerful, pretty Lisp that combines great C interoperability, safe memory semantics, and inferred types to make your life easy and enjoyable. In one sentence: it is to C as Clojure is to Java. I’d like to give you a glimpse of the language and its semantics and show you how it is similar and different from Clojure at the same time. I’m going to share the philosophy and current state of the language, as well as what’s to come and what’s missing.