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LFE (programming language)

  • 17 min read
  • 5 chapters

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History

Initial release

Initial work on LFE began in 2007, when Robert Virding started creating a prototype of Lisp running on Erlang. This work was focused primarily on parsing and exploring what an implementation might look like. No version control system was being used at the time, so tracking exact initial dates is somewhat problematic.

Virding announced the first release of LFE on the Erlang Questions mail list in March 2008. This release of LFE was very limited: it did not handle recursive letrecs, binarys, receive, or try; it also did not support a Lisp shell.

Initial development of LFE was done with version R12B-0 of Erlang on a Dell XPS laptop.

Motives

Robert Virding has stated that there were several reasons why he started the LFE programming language:

  • He had prior experience programming in Lisp.
  • Given his prior experience, he was interested in implementing his own Lisp.
  • In particular, he wanted to implement a Lisp in Erlang: not only was he curious to see how it would run on and integrate with Erlang, he wanted to see what it would look like.
  • Since helping to create the Erlang programming language, he had had the goal of making a Lisp which was specifically designed to run on the BEAM and able to fully interact with Erlang/OTP.
  • He wanted to experiment with compiling another language on Erlang. As such, he saw LFE as a means to explore this by generating Core Erlang and plugging it into the backend of the Erlang compiler.

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