Fennel fennel logo

Fennel is a programming language that brings together the simplicity, speed, and reach of Lua with the flexibility of a lisp syntax and macro system.

Anywhere you can run Lua code, you can run Fennel code.

Install it now!

;; Sample: read the state of the keyboard and move the player accordingly
(local dirs {:up [0 -1] :down [0 1] :left [-1 0] :right [1 0]})

(each [key [dx dy] (pairs dirs)]
  (when (love.keyboard.isDown key)
    (let [[px py] player
          x (+ px (* dx player.speed dt))
          y (+ py (* dy player.speed dt))]
      (world:move player x y))))

I don't feel like installing it right now!

Fine, you can use Fennel right here without installing anything:

Curious about how a piece of code compiles? See for yourself with a side-by-side view how Fennel turns into Lua and vice-versa.

Documentation

Looking for other versions? Docs are generated for:

Community

Fennel's repository is on Sourcehut, and discussion occurs on the mailing list and the #fennel channel on Libera.Chat and on Matrix . There is a read-only mirror of the repository on GitHub for those who prefer it.

Come meet the Fennel community and make friends at any of our community events. Community interactions are subject to the code of conduct. We periodically run surveys of the community.

Bug reports are tracked in Sourcehut or Github. See the security page for details about security issues.

There is also a wiki for collecting ideas. Take a look at the list of codebases written in Fennel if you want to get a feel for how larger projects look. The cookbook has smaller self-contained examples.