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Chicken Scheme 5.0

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Chicken Scheme 5.0

#1
CHICKEN is a compiler for the Scheme programming language. It produces portable and efficient C and supports the R5RS and R7RS (work in progress) standards, and many extensions. More info at https://www.call-cc.org/

A new major version has just been released. See the announcement message here: http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2018-11/msg00006.html

Chicken Scheme 5.0
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Re: Chicken Scheme 5.0

#3
For those wondering what this is like I was: Chicken is a compiler for a version of the Scheme language, which is a dialect of LISP. It compiles to portable C.

Re: Chicken Scheme 5.0

#5
Great news!

When I applied for my present job (at a Golang/JS place), the dumb little coding exercise I was asked to do said it could be done in any language. Before thinking about whether or not it would actually be a good idea, I'd opened a new file and started hacking with this at the top:

;; you said any language

;; this is chicken scheme

And it worked! Thank you, chicken.

Re: Chicken Scheme 5.0

#8
I wrote an IRC bot[1] to get a feel for Scheme in general earlier this year. I chose Chicken for it, which got me to look into Cheney on the MTA and other implementation details which were really interesting.

The FFI is really nice, given that Chicken compiles to C.

The Chicken IRC channel was a lot of help early on.

All in all an enjoyable experience!

[1] https://github.com/sebcat/kylling/blob/master/kylling.scm

Re: Chicken Scheme 5.0

#9
One of the best intros to generational garbage collection is on chicken internals[1]. If you've ever wondered about GCs I thoroughly recommend giving the article a read, it's full of interesting asides as well.

I think I would use chicken more but usually when reaching for scheme it seems to be because I want something embeddable. Even so, extremely excited about this release!

[1]: https://www.more-magic.net/posts/internals-gc.html

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