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Chicken Scheme 6.0

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Re: Chicken Scheme 6.0

#21

Post by anthk »

Uhm. I'm divided. Common Lisp it's the weird cousin, bloated at first but in the end you get SBCL, ECL or CCL and almost everything will work the same. With Scheme, you need to instal SRFI's to complete SICP exercises and then there's R5RS and R7RS.

You have no way to run Hypergiant under Guile. In Common Lisp, tons of packages for QuickLisp/UltraLisp will run on SBCL, CCL and ECL with ease.

In the end Scheme+Dependencies can be more convoluted than a subset of Common Lisp (you can avoid CLOS if you don't need it for instance).

Re: Chicken Scheme 6.0

#22

Post by anta40 »

hellcow wrote: post #16
rmunn wrote: post #8

For those who use Chicken Scheme: what made you pick it over other Lisps? What are some things it does particularly well?

The eggs are great. For instance I can be up and running building an SDL2 game or make a webserver quickly. It has good emacs support with geiser-chicken. Because it compiles down to C the FFI provides a lot of nice ergonomics beyond what I get with Chez Scheme. Error messages are actually useful with a stacktrace. Can't overstate this. It supports optional type definitions which reduces the number of tests I need. T…

What about Gambit? Perhaps it's a better, optimizing compiler but the built-in library is rather minimalist?

Re: Chicken Scheme 6.0

#24

Post by zelphirkalt »

I only used Chicken for a short time, because of a UTF-8 bug it had/has, but I always liked Chicken's docs. They seem to be written with care and often make things understandable. When I look up Scheme things and don't understand something, sometimes I specifically go for the Chicken Scheme docs, to see if I understand its explanation.

Re: Chicken Scheme 6.0

#25

Post by atemerev »

rmunn wrote: post #8

For those who use Chicken Scheme: what made you pick it over other Lisps? What are some things it does particularly well?

Self-contained, compact, compiled, fast, ready to use.

SBCL is not compact and its "image" concept is not universally liked by everyone.

Guile and Racket are not fast (nor compact).

Chez Scheme is not "ready to use".

Re: Chicken Scheme 6.0

#26

Post by bandrami »

shakna wrote: post #20
p_l wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC not compiled (you can include the interpreter). But then Scheme was always less EVAL-friendly of the lisps

I'm not seeing the less friendly... Eval, and sandboxing eval, are builtin features of the Scheme standard.

It has eval but it lacks reader macros (or at least it did thirty years ago) which is what makes eval useful on lisp2 systems.

Re: Chicken Scheme 6.0

#27

Post by jeandrek »

anthk wrote: post #21

Uhm. I'm divided. Common Lisp it's the weird cousin, bloated at first but in the end you get SBCL, ECL or CCL and almost everything will work the same. With Scheme, you need to instal SRFI's to complete SICP exercises and then there's R5RS and R7RS. You have no way to run Hypergiant under Guile. In Common Lisp, tons of packages for QuickLisp/UltraLisp will run on SBCL, CCL and ECL with ease. In the end Scheme+Depende…

I've never really heard of installing SRFIs (could be my ignorance); do you mean importing them? Or is installing SRFI implementations as their own packages really common? (Haven't really tried R7.)

The anti-R6/R7 folks (or what I've heard) won't see a problem so long as you can use CL to build fancy serious software, which lets Scheme stay small and simple for education. (Of course ideally you'd be able to do any SICP exercise on a Scheme implementation out of the box, though.)

Re: Chicken Scheme 6.0

#28

Post by tonyg »

atemerev wrote: post #25
rmunn wrote: post #8

For those who use Chicken Scheme: what made you pick it over other Lisps? What are some things it does particularly well?

Self-contained, compact, compiled, fast, ready to use. SBCL is not compact and its "image" concept is not universally liked by everyone. Guile and Racket are not fast (nor compact). Chez Scheme is not "ready to use".

In many benchmarks, Racket is significantly faster than many other Scheme implementations, including Chicken: https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/ This is because it is now based on Chez.

It is certainly not compact, though.

Re: Chicken Scheme 6.0

#29

Post by anthk »

jeandrek wrote: post #27
anthk wrote: post #21

Uhm. I'm divided. Common Lisp it's the weird cousin, bloated at first but in the end you get SBCL, ECL or CCL and almost everything will work the same. With Scheme, you need to instal SRFI's to complete SICP exercises and then there's R5RS and R7RS. You have no way to run Hypergiant under Guile. In Common Lisp, tons of packages for QuickLisp/UltraLisp will run on SBCL, CCL and ECL with ease. In the end Scheme+Depende…

I've never really heard of installing SRFIs (could be my ignorance); do you mean importing them? Or is installing SRFI implementations as their own packages really common? (Haven't really tried R7.) The anti-R6/R7 folks (or what I've heard) won't see a problem so long as you can use CL to build fancy serious software, which lets Scheme stay small and simple for education. (Of course ideally you'd be able to do any SI…

For that I use Chicken 5 with trace, srfi-203 and srfi-216.

Re: Chicken Scheme 6.0

#30

Post by cheshire_cat »

tonyg wrote: post #28
atemerev wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-contained, compact, compiled, fast, ready to use. SBCL is not compact and its "image" concept is not universally liked by everyone. Guile and Racket are not fast (nor compact). Chez Scheme is not "ready to use".

In many benchmarks, Racket is significantly faster than many other Scheme implementations, including Chicken: https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/ This is because it is now based on Chez. It is certainly not compact, though.

Would be interesting to see how Crunch [0][1] does on that benchmark. Any plans to add it to the benchmark?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252127

[1] https://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/6/crunch

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