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Having fun with Chicken Scheme

Switch from Guile Scheme to Chicken Scheme

Lately have been dabbling in Guile Scheme. Guile Scheme is very fast and since is it the main development environment for Guix, its popularity is rising.

I tried Chicken Scheme because it can create a stand-alone executable. This means that once compiled, it can run on systems where Chicken Scheme is not installed. Maybe this can be done too with Guile Scheme, but I haven't discovered a way to do that.

Chicken Scheme compiles your code into an executable, no need to jump though hoops to do that.

Chicken Scheme is fun

Although my experience with Chicken Scheme is limited and I have been working with it for only a few weeks now, I have come to like it very much.

Chicken Scheme is Scheme, and Scheme, like Lisp, is a wonderful language to work in.

Because Chicken compiles to an executable, even during prototyping you immediately try out things on the command line.

It is easy to create small personal applications. Whatever you build, you can run it on all your machines. I have a mixed environment, mostly FreeBSD and some Linux virtual machines. So for the Linux VM's I have installed Chicken on one of them, and recompile the application there, and it can be deployed on the other Linux VM's by just scp-ing it.

csm makes it very easy to split up your project into multiple files. No hassle, just make each file a module and import the module in the other files where needed.

Once you have build a nice application, it is easy to distribute, just share the stand alone executable.

Not fast

When I did some work with Guile Scheme, I was impressed by how fast it is. Guile Scheme as far as I know uses threading.

Compared to Guile, I think Chicken Scheme is not that fast, but I haven't done any benchmarks and because I am not a Scheme expert or a programming expert, this is just an opinion and you should take this with a grain of salt.

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