5 ms·
Chicken Scheme 6.0
- DASD 2mo agoFolks may also be interested that this version, 6.0, supports Crunch(although Crunch itself has not been declared a 1.0 status, currently @ .993), which is a compiler for a statically typed subset of Scheme R7RS. (https://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/6/crunch https://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/6/crunch)
- valorzard 2mo agoCRUNCH is really cool, I helped make it work better on Windows (although it requires a bit of setup)
- dvduval 2mo ago[flagged]
- Waterluvian 2mo agoThey’re patch notes for a release of some software that I can only assume is used by poultry to plot world domination.
- orsenthil 2mo agoFor an introduction: CHICKEN is a compiler that translates Scheme source files into C, which in turn can be fed to a C compiler to generate a standalone executable. An interpreter is also available and can be used as a scripting environment or for testing programs before compilation.
- rtpg 2mo agodoes this mean that you can't do `eval`-like things in "production" systems?
- p_l 2mo agoIIRC not compiled (you can include the interpreter). But then Scheme was always less EVAL-friendly of the lisps
- shakna 2mo agoI'm not seeing the less friendly... Eval, and sandboxing eval, are builtin features of the Scheme standard.
- bandrami 2mo agoIt has eval but it lacks reader macros (or at least it did thirty years ago) which is what makes eval useful on lisp2 systems.
- floxy 2mo agoI'm interested in reading more about how reader macros make `eval` better/useful.
- shakna 2mo agoR5RS supports reader macros? Which would be 1998, and I guess only 28 years ago. That's why SRFI-49 and its descendants were a possibility. Wisp, JavaScript, brainfuck, etc. implementations all exist because the tools exist in the language.
- jeandrek 2mo agoIt does not. https://conservatory.scheme.org/schemers/Documents/Standards/R5RS/HTML/r5rs-Z-H-5.html#%_chap_2 https://conservatory.scheme.org/schemers/Documents/Standards... Particular implementations could.
- shakna 2mo agoThat document, shows several forms: https://conservatory.scheme.org/schemers/Documents/Standards/R5RS/HTML/r5rs-Z-H-10.html#%_sec_7.3 https://conservatory.scheme.org/schemers/Documents/Standards...
- trescenzi 2mo agoI started playing with Chicken over the weekend because I was looking for a scheme that you could build binaries of and that had a lively ecosystem. I've really enjoyed it. So far I've mostly played with web stuff. Built a wrapper around makemkvcon for ripping some dvds I've been meaning to rip that'll do a little bit of automatic naming of output using the tv db. I was slightly worried that I'd start using v5 and then v6 would come out but it looked like they'd been working on it for a while so I figured I'd have some time on v5. Turns out I was wrong!
- SomeHacker44 2mo agoHow would it be for a 2D game?
- trescenzi 2mo agoI’ve thought a tiny bit about this. I think I’d lean towards Guile for a game because of Hoot, wasm compiler, and Chickadee, little game library. But I’m remarkably unqualified to have a real opinion since I’ve used Chicken for 72 hours now.
- hellcow 2mo agoThere's raylib and sdl2 eggs available. Those are a great place to start.
- fgh 2mo agoI am currently looking into simple options for using Scheme as a scripting language in a game written in C. So far, s7 made a good impression for embedding it, but I am also not that far into evaluating the actual performance. I looked a bit at Chicken, and it seemed possible to embed, but too complicated for my purposes.
- ziotom78 2mo agoI would use Guile for that, its documentation about how to use it as a scripting language within a C program is excellent. It is being used by many projects for this purpose: GNU Cash, Lilypond, GNU Guix... I don't know about games, however.
- ziotom78 2mo agoI was eagerly waiting for this release, which brings full Unicode support. Congratulations to the team, Chicken Scheme is a little gem!
- rmunn 2mo agoFor those who use Chicken Scheme: what made you pick it over other Lisps? What are some things it does particularly well?
- whartung 2mo agoThe compiler. That’s the gem of the system. The generated C is reasonably portable, so you can run Scheme programs on systems that “don’t run Scheme”.
- ziotom78 2mo agoAbsolutely. And eggs too [1]: these are libraries provided by the community, very easy to import and use. [1] https://wiki.call-cc.org/eggs https://wiki.call-cc.org/eggs
- rmunn 2mo agoWhat happens if you try to run Python eggs under Chicken? Do you get Roko's Basilisk? :-)
- sph 2mo agoPythons are too cold to hatch Chicken eggs, and viceversa
- shakna 2mo agoJust to run with the joke - one project I worked on was a CPython extension. We used Chicken to build out our library to do some rather hacky things and bring async/await to Python before it supported it. And we did call it basilisk.
- hellcow 2mo agoThe 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. The docs are adequate, though I frequently add "MIT scheme" to my search queries. I wasn't able to get chicken-doc setup in NixOS, and the docs website has gone down on me a bunch lately. I wish Chicken had complete documentation available including its eggs in an offline format, like a PDF.
- personjerry 2mo agoDisappointed to learn this is unrelated to the Chicken chicken chicken https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk
- orthoxerox 2mo agoHow can you tell?
- volkadav 2mo agoOriginal presentation: https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.ppt https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.ppt :)
- Decabytes 2mo agoWhy do people use chicken over gambit? Is it due to chicken’s larger ego system and eggs, or is there more?
- danialsams 2mo agongl this is a massive update full R7Rs support UTF-8 strings and they finally ditched blobs for bytevectors the closure reuse otpimization sounds interesting too ngl
- anthk 2mo agoUhm. 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).
- jeandrek 2mo agoI'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.)
- anthk 2mo agoFor that I use Chicken 5 with trace, srfi-203 and srfi-216.
- hajile 2mo agoScheme SRFIs make Scheme a much bigger language while also making it painful to use because you have to research which SRFI are implemented in your scheme variant then map those SRFI numbers to what they actually do then you usually need read the raw SRFI because that's the only documentation around. R7RS is going on 14 years old and there's still no R7RS-large either. They really need to just take the critical SFRIs, give them names and proper documentation, then call them R7RS-large and move the current work to a future R8RS.
- anthk 2mo agoIndeed. Scheme it's amazing for embedded (such as s9) and its small size. Also, the SICP it's cool to do with Chicken Scheme and this ~/.csirc (and chicken install srfi-203 and srfi-216): (import scheme) (import (srfi 203)) (import (srfi 216)) (define (displaynl x) (display x) (newline)) (define pi (* 4 (atan 1.0))) Even if Chicken has Hypergiant to play with 3D objects, Common Lisp has Kandria, Sketch, Kons-9... From Scheme, after finishing SICP as an Scheme exercise (and CS course), just jump into Common Lisp, and finish both Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation and Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence, where you will implement a micro-Scheme in Common Lisp itself as an exercise. SBCL allows you to create working stuff with very few dependencies (uiop and the like from QuickLisp/Ultralisp). With Scheme/Chicken you will get lost in a maze of eggs and SRFI's. And, on CS/academics, if you finish SICP both GITC and PAIP on on Common Lisp will be a breeze and it will give you superpowers with these three books.
- zelphirkalt 2mo agoI 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.
- Myzura 2mo agoHappy to see CHICKEN 6.0 out. Moving to full R7RS and UTF-8 strings was long overdue. The change from blobs to bytevectors and the process-object API look particularly clean. Anyone who has already started porting code — any major gotchas so far?
- sabot90260 2mo agoNative UTF-8 strings are the part I care about most here. The old blob-versus-string juggling was the first thing that bit me porting code.
- dleslie 2mo ago- Strings and symbols passed to foreign code are not copied, they are passed directly, any mutations done by external code will be visible on the Scheme side. - Complex numbers, C structs and unions can now be passed directly as arguments and returned as results when interfacing to C code. Those were major bottlenecks for any FFI-heavy Chicken Scheme app, and would often result in brittle and unsafe abstractions to work around. Glad to see this changed.