> I find the REPL and interactive development workflow invaluable. A window manager is a long-running background service by nature, and has a lot of accumulated runtime states. The ability to peek inside and debug while the process keeps running helped me a lot when building Jwno.
Sure, but any particular reason you picked Janet over Common Lisp? They both support images, REPL, hot-code-reloading, etc.
TBH I dived right in when I decided I should build something with Janet, and didn't really consider any alternatives. Now you mentioned it, I think Janet's simplicity and conciseness played a large part in attracting me to it, comparing to Common Lisp at least.
Janet being a tiny embeddable runtime similar to Lua probably makes it perfect for a use-case like this. You have a full language, standard library, and interpreter in ~1 MB, along with the ability to bundle the runtime with your scripts into one binary. That's worth a lot.