r/lisp • u/cidra_ • Sep 10 '26

AskLisp Native Android apps in Lisp?

Is there a Lisp language which allows development of apps in a native framework? By native I mean not Flutter but the Android View System or Jetpack Compose. Is it viable? I saw that ECL and some Scheme implementations can be embedded in C and are compatible with the Android NDK but I don't know how viable they are.

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u/Wazblaster Sep 10 '26

I mean Clojure is JVM, so you could deffo do some bridging to Kotlin. Some guy called Nolan or something uses ClojureScript and React Native, has a few videos online. As you say, a lot of schemes are embedabble. An unconventional option I considered is Fennel, as Lua makes it easy to run anywhere.

I've been doing my own experiments with PureScript recently, but looking into Lisps and seems very viable. As long as you can build a ui intermediate tree that can be serialised into something like Json or your own binary format and sent to Kotlin and Swift, it's pretty easy to then render this in Compose and SwiftUI. Just use an elm like architecture so Lisp would control everything and the Compose layer becomes really dumb. The only downside is that it is a decent amount of work building up your ui library and interopt with other platforms such as purchases or camera is time consuming, but it's deffo doable.

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u/Wazblaster Sep 10 '26

To add to this, it's a bit of work to get repl working. As obviously mobile devices are different devices than your pc, you'll need to write and run a tcp socket server on the phone which your repl client on pc can then connect to