One of my exploratory projects while I still though that academics career made sense involved replacing smalltalk's stack based bytecode with incrementally transformed S-expression trees. Naturally the first thing I went out to do was writing S-expression reader and writer in smalltalk, my advisor at the time told me that it is pointless busywork and I should just use ST literal syntax, it looked somewhat ugly with all the # there, but saved a lot of time.

Well, 12 years later (ie. early 2023) I realized that I don't really have any kind of cool sideproject and started implementing the same idea in C (with the added goal of the VM being natively multithreaded with fine-grained locking along the lines of JikesRVM and WebKit). Well, I have stub implementations of classes needed for the AST representation and S-expression reader and writer…