There are some mini typed functional languages here - https://plzoo.andrej.com/

Although they are implemented in OCaml, which feels like more magic than say a Forth or Lisp written in C. In C you can still "see" how it runs on hardware

I think Standard ML is actually the "usable mini ML"

These types of languages will always be bigger than Lisp/Forth/Tcl, because they require lexer /parser / type checker / GC runtime

---

Although I would like to see someone do the smallest possible C version of an ML

Something like c4 - C in 4 Functions (https://github.com/rswier/c4) - which actually has a type checker! (which is hard to see on first reading)

That’s great, thanks! I see there is a mini Haskell there too. But yes, a smallest possible ML is what I had in mind.

Gleam[1] is influenced a lot by ML and is a very simple language. But it's not a "just for fun" language. I like it a lot.

[1] https://gleam.run/

Yes I’ve played with Gleam. A nice small language but bigger than I had in mind. That’s mainly to look under the covers, which in Gleam’s case involves other language platforms, so less interesting in this context.

I don't know if these match your definition of "tiny", but there's Miranda:

https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/

and I wrote a pure, lazy, functional language and self-hosted compiler based upon Miranda:

https://github.com/taolson/Admiran

Nice!

SASL (the predecessor to Miranda) isn't statically typed, but it's very small and very much feels like a language in the ML tradition.

Nils from T3X has a micro ML language too.

http://t3x.org/mlite/index.html

That’s the closest so far, thanks!