# The role of femtolisp in Julia?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-role-of-femtolisp-in-julia/1902>\
**Category:** Internals & Design\
**Tags:** question, history\
**Created:** [February 4, 2017, 12:46pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-role-of-femtolisp-in-julia/1902 "2017-02-04T12:46:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 6

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**Author:** ![ihnorton](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/ihnorton/32/26_2.png) [@ihnorton](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ihnorton)\
**Post date:** [February 5, 2017, 2:12pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-role-of-femtolisp-in-julia/1902/6 "2017-02-05T14:12:19Z")

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> [@abhi18av](#):
>
> And apart from the source is there any blog/article you know of that’d help me distinguish various aspects of the compiler system.

[http://docs.julialang.org/en/stable/#devdocs](http://docs.julialang.org/en/stable/#devdocs)

> [@abhi18av](#):
>
> at which layer does one need to work on to create such extensions.

All of them.

> [@abhi18av](#):
>
> Does femtolisp only translates the julia surface syntax to this pseudo-typed-scheme syntax

Yes.

> [@abhi18av](#):
>
> I see that the base is defined in Julia itself so what exactly does the C/C++ part does?

Among other things: i/o primitives, memory allocation/gc, JIT compile to machine code via LLVM.

See also:

> [@Examining an older and simpler version of Julia](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/examining-an-older-and-simpler-version-of-julia/1142/2):
>
> I haven’t been around quite that long, but here are a few interesting points to look at: the first 10-20 commits: basic parser beginning of codegen: [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/commit/17f383fec059f](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/commit/17f383fec059f) beginning of dlopen / ccall support: [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/commit/18f456233b280f](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/commit/18f456233b280f) beginning of ast translation to C: [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/commit/89247a6bf2eeb](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/commit/89247a6bf2eeb) beginning of interpreter: [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/commit/6c2b43c2b3e2986b](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/commit/6c2b43c2b3e2986b) You can get a nice…

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