Phel v0.36.0 – Lisp on PHP, now with numeric tower and first-class Vars (github.com)

Phel compiles a Clojure-flavoured Lisp to PHP. v0.36.0 ships exact rationals (1/2 literals), arbitrary-precision BigInteger with overflow auto-promotion, BigDecimal, first-class Vars (#'sym, alter-var-root, with-redefs, watches), and new value types (UUID, Queue, MapEntry). Plus REPL and test boot are notably faster.

"inspired by clojure" - is there a better signal for good taste and quality?

Great work on this release! Glad to see the dot-separated namespace syntax being standardized in the core.

It would be great if the Phel repl could connect to a running PHP process

I've been following this project for a while, congratulations on the release!

Even though I don't have much use for PHP at the moment, I wish it finds a niche in the market and becomes widely used. Good luck!

Could not help but notice that this project has no explicit policy on whether AI contributions are allowed or not (i.e. nothing analogous to https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/).

This is fun to see. I wonder how they handle the fact that PHP puts every type of thing in its own namespace (names of classes, functions, constants, methods, variables, member variables, static variables and class constants don't conflict with eachother) and how not all namespaces have case-sensitivity. That's very un-lisp, maybe it just uses its own lisp-specific namespace?

Love this!