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by rmunn10 hours ago |
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upvoteby hellcow7 hours ago|
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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.

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.

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upvoteby anta403 hours ago|
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What about Gambit? Perhaps it's a better, optimizing compiler but the built-in library is rather minimalist?
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upvoteby whartung10 hours ago|
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The 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”.

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upvoteby ziotom789 hours ago|
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Absolutely. And eggs too [1]: these are libraries provided by the community, very easy to import and use.

[1] https://wiki.call-cc.org/eggs

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upvoteby rmunn8 hours ago|
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What happens if you try to run Python eggs under Chicken? Do you get Roko's Basilisk? :-)
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upvoteby sph8 hours ago|
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Pythons are too cold to hatch Chicken eggs, and viceversa
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upvoteby atemerev3 hours ago|
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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".

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upvoteby tonyg1 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby cheshire_cat1 hours ago|
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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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upvoteby anthk15 minutes ago|
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Well, SBCL can just use sources just fine. On Guile not being fast enough, it got a JIT since version 3 and it can be pretty fast. It must be, you know, because if not Guix would be even slower.
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