[Chicken-users] Choosing chicken

[Shawn W .]

I like scheme a lot. It's one of my two favorite programming  
languages for things that don't force me to use a specific language.

One of schemes strengths is also a weak point -- because the core  
language is so small and (Mostly) easy to implement, there are  
approximately fifty thousand implementations, all different,  
especially when it comes to adding useful things not in R4RS or R5RS  
-- like a module/library system, file manipulation beyond opening and  
closing, sockets, and so forth. Over the last couple of years the  
SRFI process has really helped, but it's still difficult to write  
code that runs on more than a handful of different schemes if you  
want to stray beyond what the standard defines in way of available  
functions.

I've pretty much settled on chicken as my general-purpose scheme  
implementation, for a variety of reasons (Easy to use, good support,  
large user base and lots of available extensions, the core comes with  
a large enough set of units to make unix programming easy, great  
integration with C), but realistically, for the things I've been  
using it for (Mostly text processing, but I've been playing around  
with spiffy and ssp), there's no real reason, say scsh, rscheme or  
MIT scheme (Hmm. Maybe not. Looking at its web site, it only really  
supports x86 computers... of which I have none up and running.) or  
others wouldn't work just as well. For more specific tasks, some  
schemes are better suited than others -- if you want good java  
integration instead of C, you'll want kawa. If you want a small  
extension language for an existing program written in something  
besides scheme, tinyscheme or guile come to mind. To get screaming  
fast numeric code.... stalin.  And so on.

I looked around a bit and couldn't find an up-to-date comparison of  
the major, common scheme implementations, much less a guide giving  
suggested schemes to try if you want to write a program to do X.  So,  
I think I'm going to try to write up such a beast. So, some  
questions, since I want other people's views, and since there are  
schemes I haven't looked at:

What schemes do you use, for what? Why? Know of a nifty feature or  
approach a particular scheme takes that most others don't? What do  
you think a particular version (Including chicken, of course) is best  
suited for?

Thanks.

--
Shawn W.
address@hidden