Unless you want to be in some way compatible with Emacs, elisp is not a language I would use. Anyone who has written any non-trivial amount of elisp knows this.

There are other lispy languages, that are easier to embed without many of the warts of elisp. If you really want to have elisp, you have 3 ootions:

  * Implementing it yourself
  * Trying to break elisp and Emacs apart (not likely)
  * Using guile's elisp implementation. It is complete and all that, but then you should just use guile scheme instead.