Chicken Scheme 6.0

Folks 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)

I 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!

For 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.

I 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.

I was eagerly waiting for this release, which brings full Unicode support.

Congratulations to the team, Chicken Scheme is a little gem!

For those who use Chicken Scheme: what made you pick it over other Lisps? What are some things it does particularly well?

Why do people use chicken over gambit? Is it due to chicken’s larger ego system and eggs, or is there more?

ngl 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

Uhm. 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).

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Disappointed to learn this is unrelated to the Chicken chicken chicken https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk