Drinkable Chicken

It seems my “new” iMac is borked. The only Macs I have now are G3s, so blogging and hacking will be limited until I can afford a new one. (Speaking of which, I’m selling a bunch of stuff again. :-)

I suppose I *could* whip up Yet Another Blogging System using Gauche, but yeah… you can only write the same software so many times. ;-)

I was also trying to hack on something else in Gauche, but life kept interfering…

(( Gauche Scheme is seriously underrated, by the way. Although it’s an interpreter, it’s pretty fast; in an informal benchmark that I did just for the hell of it, it beat Chicken, Gambit, Scheme48 and Racket. Oh, and Python. ;-) I noticed this before, when it processed SXML much faster than *compiled* Chicken code. Also, it comes with a bunch of libraries baked in, and has a decent Windows version. What’s not to like? Well I do have a list of ideas for improvement actually, maybe someday I’ll blog about it… ))

Anyway, the plan is now, to raise ~$2000 so I can buy an iPad and a Mac that can actually be used to develop iOS software. Hence the renewed selling of stuff… As usual, I am also available for odd jobs and part-time work.

I just discovered Gauche Scheme. I have been looking for a Lisp/Scheme dialect for my latest pet project, and it seems this is just what the doctor ordered.

• It’s cross-platform (Unixoid systems and Windows)
• Builds out of the box on Mac OS X, even on my old G3
• Supports both hygienic and “dirty” macros
• Comes with an object system
• Comes with a bunch of libraries out of the box (like a HTTP library, which is one of the things I needed)
• Works with SLIB; in fact, if SLIB is already installed, it will find it and integrate it
• Supports a large number of SRFIs

Chicken has most of this too, except it lacks Windows binaries, and it recently got rid of unhygienic macros. Libraries can be installed as eggs, of course, so it might not need SLIB.

Anyway, said “pet project” involves making HTTP GET calls, and requires a powerful object system. (More about this later, if it ever becomes usable.) I wanted to use a Lisp/Scheme dialect for flexibility, and I wanted it to be cross-platform if at all possible, so users can run it on Windows as well. It turned out that it was remarkably hard to find a Scheme that matched all these requirements. I will not go into all the problems that I encountered, but suffice to say that Gambit, Scheme48, PLT and Petite Chez Scheme all had their own issues. (That is not to say that I won’t use them for other projects…)

That said, I might still change my mind and use Common Lisp instead… :-)