phel-lang/phel-lang

Phel is a functional programming language that compiles to PHP

v0.23.1 2025-10-05 19:39 UTC

Requires

• php: >=8.3
• gacela-project/gacela: ^1.10
• phpunit/php-timer: ^6.0
• symfony/console: ^7.3

Requires (Dev)

• ext-readline: *
• ergebnis/composer-normalize: ^2.48
• friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer: ^3.88
• phpbench/phpbench: ^1.4
• phpstan/phpstan: ^2.1
• phpunit/phpunit: ^10.5
• psalm/plugin-phpunit: ^0.19
• rector/rector: ^2.1
• symfony/var-dumper: ^7.3
• vimeo/psalm: ^5.26

MIT

• Jens Haase
• Jose M. Valera Reales

• language
• functional
• lisp
• phel

README

Phel is a functional, Lisp-inspired programming language that compiles to PHP. It brings the expressive power of Clojure and the simplicity of Janet to the PHP ecosystem — enabling you to write concise, immutable, and composable code that runs anywhere PHP does.

Example

; Define a namespace
(ns my\example)

; Define a variable with name "my-name" and value "world"
(def my-name "world")

; Define a function with name "print-name" and one argument "your-name"
(defn print-name [your-name]
  (print "hello" your-name))

; Call the function
(print-name my-name)

Documentation

• Website
  Discover features, tutorials, exercises, and the latest blog posts.
• Installation
  Get started quickly with scaffolding or manual installation.
• Packagist
  Find Phel on the official PHP package repository.
• Internals
  Learn more about the compiler’s inner workings.
• Examples
  Explore practical scripts you can run directly with the Phel CLI.

Build PHAR

Run the following command to create a standalone PHAR executable:

./build/phar.sh

The generated build/out/phel.phar can then be executed directly.

Contribute

Please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md for information on how to contribute to Phel. For a quick overview of project layout, tooling, and review expectations, visit the Repository Guidelines.