Your favorite implementation?

Discussion of Scheme and Racket
schoppenhauer
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Re: Your favorite implementation?

Post by schoppenhauer » Mon Aug 18, 2008 4:13 pm

I like Guile - because it is the only Scheme Implementation i have ever really used for something. And i think stalin is interesting - the code stalin generates is somehow ... frightening.
Sorry for my bad english.
Visit my blog http://blog.uxul.de/

mikael
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Jul 10, 2008 4:17 pm

Re: Your favorite implementation?

Post by mikael » Fri Oct 17, 2008 8:10 am

Through its robustness, performance, extensive debugging features, clustering functionality, expert community, and through being open source, Gambit Scheme http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/ is certainly a very strong candidate. An extensive module system is underway, easing incremental development processes for large projects.

Ikarus http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~aghuloum/ikarus/ is interesting by being one of the industry's most sophisticated incremental compilers. It has very high potential upside in performance, though may not score highest in debuggability features. The commercial analogue to Ikarus is Chez Scheme http://www.scheme.com/ .

TinyScheme http://tinyscheme.sourceforge.net/ is interesting through being a small interpreter environment.

Bigloo http://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Bigloo/ is interesting through generating small binaries.

SISC http://sisc-scheme.org/ is interesting through providing a complete R5RS Scheme environment atop Java.

Scheme generally signifies itself by its many high quality implementations, including Chicken http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/ , PLT http://plt-scheme.org/ , MIT http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/scheme/ , Gauche http://practical-scheme.net/gauche/ , and many others, as well.

In terms of pre-built libraries, it may be that PLT and Chicken score the highest. Though, like when planning any technology project, you need to ask yourself what libraries are relevant to you, and what purpose they should fill, in detail.

Generally speaking, Scheme implementations differentiate themselves through

- how they execute code (direct compilation to binary code such as X86 binary code or JIT, compilation to another language such as C, C++ or Javascript, incremental compilation, interpretation)
- how they do threading (green threading, operating system threads such as pthreads, none, mixed)
- if they fully support continuations
- how R5RS and/or R6RS compliant they are
- how performant they are
- how robust they are
- what debuggability features they have
- how deep operating system integration they have, and for what operating systems

Scheme has the world's highest number of high-quality software development environments for one and the same programming language.

Leonidas
Posts: 6
Joined: Sun Jun 29, 2008 7:58 am

Re: Your favorite implementation?

Post by Leonidas » Sun Oct 19, 2008 11:25 am

I favor PLT Scheme because it contains a lot of stuff and is rather well documented. And the mailing list is great for asking questions.

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