chicken scheme

Introduction

Chicken is a implementation of the Scheme programming language. It includes a compiler that builds portable C files from Scheme files, which can in turn be compiled to produce an executable. An interpreter which loads and evaluates code directly, csi, is also included.

We are writing a Chicken Scheme Manual.

Chicken is actively maintained by Felix Winkelmann. Help is offered through the mailing list and you can frequently catch Felix and other very helpful persons in the IRC channel.

If you use Chicken, you will probably want to use a recent version. Chicken has improved very much lately and earlier versions contained many bugs.

Chicken uses native C types to represent data. For instance, fixnums (integers) are represented using 29 bits. Larger numbers need to be represented as floats (though you can use around 40 bits of precision when representing integers as floats). This makes Chicken very fast when compared with other scheme implementations, but it might be a problem for certain programs.

Also, since Chicken translates Scheme code to C, it makes it very easy and fast to call C libraries directly from Scheme code.

svnwiki is written for this particular Scheme implementation.