5 ms·

My lisp experience has been largely restricted to writing elisp. I would really love to write something in Scheme though. How well maintained and diverse are th

My lisp experience has been largely restricted to writing elisp. I would really love to write something in Scheme though. How well maintained and diverse are the GambitScheme libraries? I see three different sets on their packages page, do you have any experience with those or would you have some better suggestions?

rrradical 13y ago
I didn't use many libraries. It's pretty straightforward to interface with C code, so instead of writing a whole OpenGL wrapper, I just call into some C code to handle the rendering. It was somewhat tricky to get it all setup, but I followed in the footsteps of James Long (http://jlongster.com/s/jlongster-old/pages/blog/write-apps-iphone-scheme.html http://jlongster.com/s/jlongster-old/pages/blog/write-apps-i...) and a few others. I hope to contribute back what I learned and make it easier for others to use it for games in the future. It's seriously a great language for game writing.
- anuragramdasan 13y ago
  I agree. I would love to someday be able to build on mobile using games. It would be amazing if you could share a writeup or maybe a hello world starter template on running Gambit on iOS or android. This seems like a lovely project. Congratulations and good luck.
- Turing_Machine 13y ago
  Would love to see it! I ran across Long's page some time ago, but unfortunately it's way out of date.
Touche 13y ago
> How well maintained and diverse are the GambitScheme libraries? The library situation in Gambit is.... very bad. Last time I tried it (~6 months ago) you had to compile from a different branch to get Blackhole to work. Chicken Scheme has a much better ecosystem. It also compiles to C and is fast. Gambit is known for its speed so I won't say Chicken is as fast but it is "fast enough" and the ecosystem is worth the difference IMO.
- klibertp 13y ago
  Seconded. I recently evaluated quite a few Scheme implementations for a very simple web scraping project and found Chicken to be both fast and great with its packages. chicken-install feels almost like pip or npm and it works really well. The packages are many and most of them are nicely documented. If you need a Scheme with compile-to-C capability and a bunch of batteries included then Chicken Scheme is the way to go.

rrradical 13y ago

I didn't use many libraries. It's pretty straightforward to interface with C code, so instead of writing a whole OpenGL wrapper, I just call into some C code to handle the rendering. It was somewhat tricky to get it all setup, but I followed in the footsteps of James Long (http://jlongster.com/s/jlongster-old/pages/blog/write-apps-iphone-scheme.html http://jlongster.com/s/jlongster-old/pages/blog/write-apps-i...) and a few others. I hope to contribute back what I learned and make it easier for others to use it for games in the future. It's seriously a great language for game writing.

anuragramdasan 13y ago
I agree. I would love to someday be able to build on mobile using games. It would be amazing if you could share a writeup or maybe a hello world starter template on running Gambit on iOS or android. This seems like a lovely project. Congratulations and good luck.
Turing_Machine 13y ago
Would love to see it! I ran across Long's page some time ago, but unfortunately it's way out of date.

Touche 13y ago

> How well maintained and diverse are the GambitScheme libraries? The library situation in Gambit is.... very bad. Last time I tried it (~6 months ago) you had to compile from a different branch to get Blackhole to work. Chicken Scheme has a much better ecosystem. It also compiles to C and is fast. Gambit is known for its speed so I won't say Chicken is as fast but it is "fast enough" and the ecosystem is worth the difference IMO.

klibertp 13y ago
Seconded. I recently evaluated quite a few Scheme implementations for a very simple web scraping project and found Chicken to be both fast and great with its packages. chicken-install feels almost like pip or npm and it works really well. The packages are many and most of them are nicely documented. If you need a Scheme with compile-to-C capability and a bunch of batteries included then Chicken Scheme is the way to go.