Lightweight programming language


Lightweight programming languages are programming languages designed to have small memory footprint, are easy to implement, and/or have minimalist syntax and features.
These programming languages have simple syntax and semantics, so one can learn them quickly and easily. Some lightweight languages are so simple to implement that they have many implementations.

Compiled languages

BASIC

BASIC implementations like Tiny BASIC were designed to be lightweight so that they could run on the microcomputers of the 1980s, because of memory constraints.

Forth

Forth is a stack-based concatenative imperative programming language using reverse Polish notation.

Toy languages

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Brainfuck

Brainfuck is an extremely minimalist esoteric programming language.

FlipJump

FlipJump is a minimalistic one-instruction set computer.

Scripting languages

Io

Io is a prototype-based object-oriented scripting language.

Lisp

Lisp-like languages are very simple to implement, so there are many lightweight implementations of it.
There are some notable implementations:
Derivatives of Lisp:

Tcl

Tcl-like languages can be easily implemented because of its simple syntax. While Tcl itself is not lightweight, there are some lightweight implementations of languages with similar syntax.

Embedded languages

ECMAScript

There are many embeddable implementation of ECMAScript like:
Derivatives of ECMAScript:

Lua

Lua is a small, portable and embeddable scripting language. It can be embedded in applications such as computer games to provide runtime scripting capabilities.

Wren

Wren is a small, fast, object-oriented scripting language.