That's exactly the approach I'm preaching. I've built entire layers of languages above Lisp using this kind of eDSLs: https://github.com/combinatorylogic/mbase

That's exactly the approach I'm preaching. I've built entire layers of languages above Lisp using this kind of eDSLs: https://github.com/combinatorylogic/mbase https://github.com/combinatorylogic/mbase So, yes, as long as you have a sufficiently powerful meta-language, eDSL is almost always better than a library. But yet, if your language is not powerful at all, DSLs (standalone) are still better then the libraries, they're just a bit more complicated to implement.