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+# Bad Diode's Lisp
+
+For some time I've been meaning to learn more about compilers and programming
+language theory. And so I found myself again delving into a rabbit hole of
+wheel-reinvention for the purpose of fun and learning.
+
+The goals for this project are to build a programming language that can be
+interpreted directly from a VM and with support for compilation to assembly
+(`x86_64` and/or `ARM (thumb or aarch64)`). It could make sense to output
+bytecode for LLVM to take advantage of the built in optimizations, but let's
+just go one step at a time. At the time I know some ARM assembly, but I'm not so
+versed in `x86_64` and know nothing of LLVM bytecode.
+
+I've chosen to implement a Lisp, perhaps a subset of Scheme. The syntax is not
+so important for now, maybe in the future the compiler will take a different
+home-brew language, but hopefully this helps setting the fundamentals for
+a minimal working compiler. In principle, we could keep the internal
+representation and language working as a lisp, but with a different external
+syntax.
+
+The language should have built-in structures for dynamic arrays, hash tables,
+strings (and string views). It should be suitable for use in embedded systems
+and be linked seamlessly with other compiled objects.
+
+Accessing system resources, such as stdio or graphics could be done via function
+calls to the give APIs. This should help decouple the CPU logic from hardware,
+hopefully facilitating porting programs to different platforms (GBA, Rasberry
+Pi, etc.).
+
+The current plan is to build a bootstrap interpreter in C that can be used to
+generate the self-hosted version of itself. I'll try to document the process
+here as best as I can.
+
+The bootstrap implementation should be kept simple, since we can focus on
+optimization once we have a self-hosting compiler.
+
+# Resources
+
+- [Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs][sicp]
+- [Crafting Interpreters][crafting-interpreters]
+- [Building a Scheme from scratch][scheme-from-scratch]
+- [Compiling a Lisp][compiling-a-lisp]
+- [An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction][ghuloum11]
+- [Make-A-Lisp Guide][mal]
+- [An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation][intro-to-scheme-and-imp]
+
+[sicp]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html
+[crafting-interpreters]: https://craftinginterpreters.com/
+[scheme-from-scratch]: http://peter.michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch-introduction
+[compiling-a-lisp]: https://bernsteinbear.com/blog/compiling-a-lisp-0/
+[ghuloum11]: http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf
+[mal]: https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/master/process/guide.md
+[intro-to-scheme-and-imp]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/ftp/garbage/cs345/schintro-v14/schintro_toc.html#SEC271