July 11, 2026
Lisp drama, browser edition
A pure scheme web programming tool
Tiny coding project shocks commenters with big brain boasts and one very annoying editor bug
TLDR: Goeteia is a small but flashy tool that lets a niche language build web apps and even recompile itself inside your browser. Commenters were split between amazement, JavaScript doom-posting, bug complaints, and a quick reminder that a rival project already does something similar.
A tiny project called Goeteia just strutted into the chat with a wild claim: a whole web-programming tool built in Scheme, a niche programming language, that can compile itself in the browser and power the page you’re looking at. For coding fans, that’s catnip. For everyone else, the simple version is this: the creator says the site is basically showing off by building itself live, with fast reruns, fancy visuals, and almost no help from JavaScript, the language most websites rely on.
And the comments? Instant mixed-awe chaos. The creator hyped the dream hard: self-hosting in the browser, web pages and styles handled like Scheme, and even using the language’s parenthesis-heavy syntax to talk to servers. One commenter turned the whole thing into a referendum on JavaScript itself, arguing that modern web apps are too easy to break quietly and too hard to verify, basically serving a spicy "maybe the old weird languages were right" vibe. That’s the kind of take that gets keyboard warriors leaning forward.
But not everyone was ready to crown a new king. One user popped in with the classic internet reality check: the editor seemed broken, with text appearing one line above the cursor. Ouch. Another brought rivalry energy, pointing out that Hoot already exists and "does a very good job," which is the polite open-source way of saying, hello, this party already has a DJ. Meanwhile, someone else was just delighted that Three.js was built in, sounding genuinely charmed that a language tool could come with such flashy toys. In other words: genius demo, immediate bug report, competitor named, everyone entertained.
Key Points
- •Goeteia is a pure Scheme web programming tool that compiles Scheme to WebAssembly, including live in-browser compilation.
- •The compiler is self-hosted: it is written in the Scheme subset it compiles, and self-rebuilds are checked for byte-identical output.
- •The implementation uses native WebAssembly GC features, hygienic macros, real closures, tail calls, numeric tower support, and continuation features such as `call/cc`.
- •Goeteia includes a reactive web stack with templates, signals, HTML rendering, and JavaScript FFI, and the article says the page itself is built with it.
- •The project provides command-line build and test steps, and compiled modules run on Node 22+, current Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and wasmtime; source bootstrapping requires Chez Scheme.