Lisp in Small Pieces

What Hacker News says

1. vkazanovJul 2026
   As a lisper, i like PLAI and all the other books from the same school: Lisp in small pieces and many others.

   But they also felt kind of detached from realities of industrial languages and compilers.

   These days Crafting Interpreters is probably the best suggestion.

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2. pjmlpApr 2026
   It was a product of its time I guess, much better ones from similar vintage,

   The Tiger book (with C, Standard ML, and Java variants)

   https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/

   Compiler Design in C (freely available nowadays, beware this is between K&R C and C89)

   https://holub.com/compiler/

   lcc, A Retargetable Compiler for ANSI C

   https://drh.github.io/lcc/

   Or if one wants to go with more clever stuff,

   Compiling with Continuations

   Lisp in Small Pieces

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3. drob518Apr 2026
   Another vote for Lisp in Small Pieces. Great high level compiler book that teaches you how to build a Lisp and doesn’t get bogged down in lexing and parsing.
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4. DonaldFiskFeb 2026
   It's well worth a read for anyone who wants to implement their own Lisp. I'd say it's the precursor of Lisp In Small Pieces by Christian Queinnec though. I have copies of both.
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5. tikotusSep 2025
   I've implemented my lisp/scheme based on Three Implementation Models for Scheme and also Lisp in Small Pieces. Both make a CPS transformation, which, after finally wrapping my head around it, is great for many things. For example it makes implementing async/await very easy (without implementing call/cc which I find too powerful). I use them a lot since I use the language for scripting games, where asynchronous structures really shine.
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6. axblountAug 2025
   Lisp In Small Pieces by Christian Queinnec

   It takes a very thoughtful approach to introducing an increasingly complex Scheme implementation. I doesn't shy away from the complexity that many LISP implementation tutorials try to push under the rug.

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