Nils Holm. Lisp from Nothing. Lulu Press. 2025.

This is a fascinating book that’s very old-school – and I mean that in the best possible way. It does exactly what it says: develops a Lisp interpreter (and then a compiler) from first principles, bootstrapped on top of an existing Lisp or Scheme against a runtime written in C, with all code provided.

It’s more than this, though. There’s a thorough discussion of the differences between dynamic and lexical variable scope (and the implications for both programming and implementation). There’s a digression into pure lambda calculus and the complexities that it introduces. There’s a basic mark/sweep garbage collector. There’s a brief history of Lisp and Lisp machines. And there’s a performance evaluation that digs into where the costs lie within the system.

Overall this is a book that every implementor should read, if only to see some other parts of the possible design space for Lisp tooling. Many applications will want to occupy a different point in that space, for example providing a richer compiler, or a richer runtime. But there’s a lot to learn from the simplicity of the choices made here.