Drinkable Chicken

(This post is just a quick introduction to using the Chicken compiler and interpreter.)

Consider this simple file:

;; hello.scm

(print "Hello, world!")

Save this as hello.scm.

Running this as a script in the interpreter is done as follows:

$ csi -s hello.scm

Note that if the -s is omitted, the script will still run, after which the interactive interpreter is started. This can be useful in some situations (e.g. to do post-execution inspection).

Alternatively, we may choose to compile the script to an executable:

$ csc hello.scm

(csc has a lot of options, but the simplest case does what most people would expect, i.e. it compiles an the executable named hello.)

Lo and behold, it works:

$ ./hello
Hello, world!

On my system (using Chicken 2.732, Mac OS X 10.4, Intel Dual Core) this produces a 14K executable, which seems quite reasonable. However, the way I understand it, this file dynamically links to the Chicken libraries. To create a standalone executable, we must use the -static command line option, which produces a much bigger file:

$ csc -static hello.scm
$ ls -l hello
-rwxr-xr-x   1 zephyrfa  zephyrfa  1370732 Dec 30 13:54 hello*

By the way, I'm not entirely sure that this really produces an executable that is 100% standalone... I'll have to do more testing.

There is much, much more to the Chicken compiler. Expect to see more about it in future posts. (Like the next one... :-)