The readme states that this is a "weekend hack." And, there are other disclaimers in the source code: "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS'. USE ENTIRELY AT YOUR OWN RISK."

I successfully built the executable, but you are right about the example. On Mac OS X, test.l crashes with a Segmentation fault. I think this is because some assumptions are being made about the layout of memory.

bench.l seems to work.

lysp by itself seems to work okay. I didn't do to much with it. It's tiny: the executable is 42224 bytes!