5 ms·

how is Gambit compared to Chicken?

by morphir 17y ago

stuntmouse 17y ago
In what respect? Benchmarks by Marc Feeley of Gambit: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bench.html http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bench.html
- morphir 17y ago
  In general. Who has the best performance? Who has the best ffi support? The most and best library support? Does anyone have a success story (case study)? Does anyone offer a painfree setup? Chicken is BSD, while Gambit i GPL - so chicken maybe preferred for its less restrictive lisence?
  - stuntmouse 17y ago
    I have to prefix this with the fact that I've only barely touched Chicken. I've been using Gambit for a few months. Performance: See benchmarks above. FFI: Gambit's is very clean. I've used this extensively, and people that are doing iPhone/Objective-C stuff with it are using the FFI. I can't comment on Chicken's FFI. Libraries: I'm guessing Chicken wins here. The egg system seems more developed and has more packages than Gambit's Black Hole. Installation: I know Gambit is painless on Linux and Mac. I can't speak to Windows nor to which Linux distros package it. Licensing: I have to correct you here. Gambit is dual licensed: LGPL 2.1 and Apache 2. Support: Chicken's community and IRC room seem active. Gambit's are too; detailed answers are rapid on the mailing list.
    - stuntmouse 17y ago
      Installation: For the record, I looked into prebuilt binaries for Gambit. The support is quite extensive for Mac and Windows. Mac: installers provided for G3, G4, G5, X86, X86-64, and universal binaries. Windows: installers for Gambit compiled with MSVC and mingw. The latest version (4.5.2) is available here: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/download/gambit/v4.5/prebuilt/ http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/download/gambit/v4.5/pre... Canonical download link: http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Distributions http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Distri...
  - stuntmouse 17y ago
    Success stories: For gambit, there is a recent 3d game [1] and Termite [2]. Termite is a version of an Erlang like system written in scheme. There may be others I'm not aware of though. [1] http://www.gamerizon.com/ http://www.gamerizon.com/ [2] http://code.google.com/p/termite/ http://code.google.com/p/termite/
    - stuntmouse 17y ago
      For the curious, the game is called Quantz. It's available on Windows and OS X.
      - jcl 17y ago
        FYI: you can edit your comments here (within two hours of the original post).
  - NikkiA 17y ago
    Personally, I think chicken is the least interesting of the 3 (bigloo, gambit and chicken) scheme->c compilers. Bigloo has the best FFI, hands down, it's simple, it offers mapping, and doesn't require you write chunks of C for each definition. It's also slightly easier to call from, and embed in, C, in my experiments. Bigloo has better potential performance, due to the strict typing abilities. Gambit has the best performance, this is probably debatable though, at least according to the benchmarks I've seen. Gambit also has the best portability, bigloo and chicken only 'mostly' work on win32 - bigloo's socket support has some annoying bugs on win32, for example, and I've had problems with chicken even compiling properly on win32, often failing to find compilers, etc. Whether Chicken or Bigloo has the best built-in module system is debatable, personally I'd prefer bigloo's over the two. Gambit's lack of a built-in module system is offset by 'black hole' which is progressing nicely, and is possibly better than both bigloo's and chicken's, in the long term. License wise, Gambit is dual (LGPL and Apache), Chicken is BSD and Bigloo is LGPL. All are pretty much equal, really, from an end-user's point of view and none of them should impart any restrictions on any programs you create with them, as far as I can tell. Edit: I knew I forgot something, I didn't mention the '4th' option - JazzScheme. Which is really just a version of Gambit with an integrated IDE, a module system similar to bigloo's, and a bunch of pre-built library mappings (Gtk, OpenGL, and a bunch more, iirc). It has potential, but for me, I don't like to have to use a provided IDE, I prefer emacs, and the 'command line' version of jazz isn't really finished yet.
    - morphir 17y ago
      when I play around with Gambit (gsi) I often end up with bus errors. This implies the word: 'half-assed' to me. So that is directly annoying and will guaranteed put new users off. Crashing is never good.
      - stuntmouse 17y ago
        That's extremely surprising. I'm sure the maintainers would be eager to hear about your experiences. Care to provide example code which triggers a crash with a little detail about version and platform? The best place to post would be the mailing list [1] or the bug tracker [2]. [1] https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/gambit-list https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/gambit-lis... [2] http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bugzilla/ http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bugzilla/
- giardini 17y ago
  Of course I jumped directly to the tabulated results but found... A helluva a way to present statistics: green values representing the CPU time in milliseconds of the fastest software while all other values on a row are normalized multipliers of that value. No attention paid to significant digits whatsoever. Jeez! Wonder what Edward Tufte would say about this one? And once again I'm grateful to not be one of the 8% of men who are color blind.
  - jcl 17y ago
    FWIW, color blindness is probably not an issue with that chart, as green is the only saturated color, and it seems to be of a dark enough value that it would not be confused with the other colors in the chart. You can preview an approximation of what a page looks like to the color blind here: http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php
    - eru 17y ago
      I am colorblind. The page seemed alright (colorwise).
      - berntb 17y ago
        Also color blind. I agree with eru.

how is Gambit compared to Chicken?

by morphir 17y ago

how is Gambit compared to Chicken?

In what respect? Benchmarks by Marc Feeley of Gambit: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bench.html http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bench.html

morphir 17y ago
In general. Who has the best performance? Who has the best ffi support? The most and best library support? Does anyone have a success story (case study)? Does anyone offer a painfree setup? Chicken is BSD, while Gambit i GPL - so chicken maybe preferred for its less restrictive lisence?
- stuntmouse 17y ago
  I have to prefix this with the fact that I've only barely touched Chicken. I've been using Gambit for a few months. Performance: See benchmarks above. FFI: Gambit's is very clean. I've used this extensively, and people that are doing iPhone/Objective-C stuff with it are using the FFI. I can't comment on Chicken's FFI. Libraries: I'm guessing Chicken wins here. The egg system seems more developed and has more packages than Gambit's Black Hole. Installation: I know Gambit is painless on Linux and Mac. I can't speak to Windows nor to which Linux distros package it. Licensing: I have to correct you here. Gambit is dual licensed: LGPL 2.1 and Apache 2. Support: Chicken's community and IRC room seem active. Gambit's are too; detailed answers are rapid on the mailing list.
  - stuntmouse 17y ago
    Installation: For the record, I looked into prebuilt binaries for Gambit. The support is quite extensive for Mac and Windows. Mac: installers provided for G3, G4, G5, X86, X86-64, and universal binaries. Windows: installers for Gambit compiled with MSVC and mingw. The latest version (4.5.2) is available here: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/download/gambit/v4.5/prebuilt/ http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/download/gambit/v4.5/pre... Canonical download link: http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Distributions http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Distri...
- stuntmouse 17y ago
  Success stories: For gambit, there is a recent 3d game [1] and Termite [2]. Termite is a version of an Erlang like system written in scheme. There may be others I'm not aware of though. [1] http://www.gamerizon.com/ http://www.gamerizon.com/ [2] http://code.google.com/p/termite/ http://code.google.com/p/termite/
  - stuntmouse 17y ago
    For the curious, the game is called Quantz. It's available on Windows and OS X.
    - jcl 17y ago
      FYI: you can edit your comments here (within two hours of the original post).
- NikkiA 17y ago
  Personally, I think chicken is the least interesting of the 3 (bigloo, gambit and chicken) scheme->c compilers. Bigloo has the best FFI, hands down, it's simple, it offers mapping, and doesn't require you write chunks of C for each definition. It's also slightly easier to call from, and embed in, C, in my experiments. Bigloo has better potential performance, due to the strict typing abilities. Gambit has the best performance, this is probably debatable though, at least according to the benchmarks I've seen. Gambit also has the best portability, bigloo and chicken only 'mostly' work on win32 - bigloo's socket support has some annoying bugs on win32, for example, and I've had problems with chicken even compiling properly on win32, often failing to find compilers, etc. Whether Chicken or Bigloo has the best built-in module system is debatable, personally I'd prefer bigloo's over the two. Gambit's lack of a built-in module system is offset by 'black hole' which is progressing nicely, and is possibly better than both bigloo's and chicken's, in the long term. License wise, Gambit is dual (LGPL and Apache), Chicken is BSD and Bigloo is LGPL. All are pretty much equal, really, from an end-user's point of view and none of them should impart any restrictions on any programs you create with them, as far as I can tell. Edit: I knew I forgot something, I didn't mention the '4th' option - JazzScheme. Which is really just a version of Gambit with an integrated IDE, a module system similar to bigloo's, and a bunch of pre-built library mappings (Gtk, OpenGL, and a bunch more, iirc). It has potential, but for me, I don't like to have to use a provided IDE, I prefer emacs, and the 'command line' version of jazz isn't really finished yet.
  - morphir 17y ago
    when I play around with Gambit (gsi) I often end up with bus errors. This implies the word: 'half-assed' to me. So that is directly annoying and will guaranteed put new users off. Crashing is never good.
    - stuntmouse 17y ago
      That's extremely surprising. I'm sure the maintainers would be eager to hear about your experiences. Care to provide example code which triggers a crash with a little detail about version and platform? The best place to post would be the mailing list [1] or the bug tracker [2]. [1] https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/gambit-list https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/gambit-lis... [2] http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bugzilla/ http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bugzilla/
giardini 17y ago
Of course I jumped directly to the tabulated results but found... A helluva a way to present statistics: green values representing the CPU time in milliseconds of the fastest software while all other values on a row are normalized multipliers of that value. No attention paid to significant digits whatsoever. Jeez! Wonder what Edward Tufte would say about this one? And once again I'm grateful to not be one of the 8% of men who are color blind.
- jcl 17y ago
  FWIW, color blindness is probably not an issue with that chart, as green is the only saturated color, and it seems to be of a dark enough value that it would not be confused with the other colors in the chart. You can preview an approximation of what a page looks like to the color blind here: http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php
  - eru 17y ago
    I am colorblind. The page seemed alright (colorwise).
    - berntb 17y ago
      Also color blind. I agree with eru.