Otium

Otium is an experimental little vibe-coded Lisp (but this README was written by a human). It has a focus on pragmatism, supporting live development, and reasonable performance.

This repository contains two other programs written in Otium (& a little bit of C). Manse, a terminal multiplexer / Lisp development environment and OtOS, a unikernel operating system.

The language & runtime

Here’s a couple of factoids about it:

• Most directly descended from Scheme, but takes some ideas from Clojure, Janet, Common Lisp in terms of practicality.
• Runtime is intended to be suitable for multi-MB memory embedded systems e.g. ESP32, RP2350 devices.
• “Good, not great” performance. It has a modest optimizing native-code compiler backed by sljit.
• Aims to be solid on memory usage. It uses an Immix-inspired non-generational garbage collector which has a separate and tuned profile for low memory systems.
• Live development is a first class citizen with a dev server that allows querying and modifying running programs
• Has a CLOS-lite style object system primarily to support rich user interfaces
• Built-in actor-style concurrency. This runs on a single native thread; the…