Re: [Chicken-users] Imlib2 question

[Graham Fawcett]

On 9/25/07, Alex Queiroz <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 9/25/07, Peter Bex <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 09:04:19AM -0400, William Ramsay wrote:
> > > Why would anyone use anything else?
> > Would you mind convincing my boss?  :)
>      Get into the queue! :-)

For what it's worth, I *did* convince my boss; I've used Chicken to
write a set of Web applications to supplement one of our campus
systems. None of the apps was supposed to last more than a semester --
we expected that the primary system itself would grow the same
features during that time -- so they were somewhat willing to let me
take a couple risks. But that was two semesters ago, and the Chicken
apps are still in business.

They've only served about 2 million requests so far (about 10,000 per
day right now), which is far from huge, but they can take a heavier
load. Lord knows I've had a couple problems with them (mostly
self-inflicted ones), but overall it's been a tremendous win.

Some of the things I would have used in my elevator pitch for Chicken
(keeping in mind that Web apps are my thing):

- running an application in a REPL (no compilation step; redefine
  anything you want, any time) is the rapidest development environment
  you can get, bar none.

- It's also a great maintenance environment; almost all bugs can be
  corrected live, without restarting a single process.

- works with all major databases (don't use that Fawcett guy's Oracle
  driver, though, it's a piece of crap); works great without them,
  too.

- can use third-party libraries written in C, Java, Python.

- You can compile the stuff that needs to run faster. Web apps don't
  tend to have too many hotspots, though.

- Chicken and Scheme are relatively easy to learn, and there are
  plenty of resources available.

- works great in a Unix environment, where forking processes is cheap:
  you can write small, fast programs that are suitable for Unix-style
  design (forks, pipes, etc.). Try *that* with Java. This is a good
  approach for shared-nothing, highly-scalable apps. Not that I wrote
  mine that way... ;-)

- What the community lacks in size, it makes up for in brain-power and
  supportiveness.

Everyone here knows that stuff, of course. ;-)

Graham