I used Chez Scheme for many years and loved its lightning fast compile times. For example, I'm not aware of any other full-scale compiler that can compile itself as fast as Chez can.
Chez Scheme is now free
21–30 of 185 posts
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#22It's about time! Although I'm curious---how did Cisco end up owning it?
If you look at scheme.com, you will see Copyright © 2011 Cadence Research Systems. Cisco bought Cadence back in 2012.
(Cadence for those who don't know are basically the equivalent of SolidWorks for anything in EE. They are the only company (maybe Synopsis or Mentor, but I think there are a few holes here and there) on the planet that lets you go from designing something as simple and low level as an analog jellybean op-amp (with state of the art EM and S-param simulation) and verification, to RTL design (full power simulation and everything), to piecing together TSMC[edit: learn2proof-read, self]-based fab designs on their 28nm processes (ASICs or SoCs), to laying out boards at the Altium level. You're paying around 100k/yr/seat for all this but if you're actually using the whole feature set it's worth every cent.
Other than Solidworks (which has everything from industrial machining stock cold-rolled steel and the finite-element analysis of your components all the way to computational fluid dynamics of anything your engineering heart could desire) I've never seen a company cover such an industry so thoroughly, so well[1].)
[1] Maybeeee Adobe has equal coverage re: for vector work with Illustrator/image manipulation with PS/page layout and typesetting with PageMaker/Indesign and doing post on Video with After Effects and such. And I don't think anyone would disagree, the degree of complexity for this genre of software is on a different tier.
edit: Haha. Confused Cadence Design Systems with Cadence Research Systems. Thanks for correcting me. Mea culpa. Keeping this up just for continuity sake. Viva la Scheme though! Have an upvote, @beering ;)
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#23IIRC, this was a high performance scheme developed at Indiana University that was closed source for a long time. Good on Cisco for open sourcing it. I'm interested to hear what regular scheme programmers feel about this news.
And aside from the JVM implementations and some works in progress the last time I checked, the only one with native instead of green threading.
GNU Guile has pthreads.
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#24Pretty great, always wanted to look at the implementation.
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any details on what you were using it for? What did you like about it vs something like Racket?
We have a macro expander for pascal written in scheme (quick and dirty draft made by me that worked so well it stayed). We had some performance problems with some crazy recursive macros (it generates a _lot_ of code. Don't ask, I am not allowed to talk much about it), so I investigated porting it to chez. Instead I just switched to guile (scheme implementation) trunk and got a 3x speedup. Did some optimizing work and…
What Scheme implementation did the code originally use?
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#26anyone know how this became cisco's to release?
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you look at scheme.com, you will see Copyright © 2011 Cadence Research Systems. Cisco bought Cadence back in 2012.
(Cadence for those who don't know are basically the equivalent of SolidWorks for anything in EE. They are the only company ( maybe Synopsis or Mentor, but I think there are a few holes here and there) on the planet that lets you go from designing something as simple and low level as an analog jellybean op-amp (with state of the art EM and S-param simulation) and verification, to RTL design (full power simulation and…
TMSC?
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Cadence for those who don't know are basically the equivalent of SolidWorks for anything in EE. They are the only company ( maybe Synopsis or Mentor, but I think there are a few holes here and there) on the planet that lets you go from designing something as simple and low level as an analog jellybean op-amp (with state of the art EM and S-param simulation) and verification, to RTL design (full power simulation and…
TMSC?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC
Biggest "independent" semiconductor foundry company (independent = they make customer designs, not their own)
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#29For people interested in the legalities of licenses, it's released under the Apache License 2.0 which is a "free software" opensource license that is compatible when combined with GPL3, but not with GPL 1 or 2.
the Apache 2.0 license includes not just copyright but patent licensing, so the software will contain no hidden patent restrictions for patents owned by the creators and contributors.
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#30I used Chez Scheme for many years and loved its lightning fast compile times. For example, I'm not aware of any other full-scale compiler that can compile itself as fast as Chez can.
OberonSystem can build the whole compiler, OS, and applications in around 3 seconds.