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)

• valorzard

  today at 3:03 AM

  CRUNCH is really cool, I helped make it work better on Windows (although it requires a bit of setup)

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.

• rtpg

  today at 5:44 AM

  does this mean that you can't do `eval`-like things in "production" systems?

  • p_l

    today at 6:52 AM

    IIRC not compiled (you can include the interpreter).

    But then Scheme was always less EVAL-friendly of the lisps

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

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

• hellcow

  today at 5:20 AM

  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.

• whartung

  today at 2:57 AM

  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”.

  • ziotom78

    today at 3:58 AM

    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

    • rmunn

      today at 4:39 AM

      What happens if you try to run Python eggs under Chicken? Do you get Roko's Basilisk? :-)

      • sph

        today at 4:55 AM

        Pythons are too cold to hatch Chicken eggs, and viceversa

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

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

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

[flagged]

• Waterluvian

  today at 1:32 AM

  They’re patch notes for a release of some software that I can only assume is used by poultry to plot world domination.

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