[Chibi Scheme] Questions regarding Chibi

[Fernando Oleo Blanco]

Hi Chibi community,

I was looking for a Scheme implementation for a project. In the end I
created a comparison table of Scheme implementations in order to help
me decide. You can find the table here:
https://irvise.xyz/Blog/scheme-implementation-comparison.html

I would like to ask for corrections and comments on the Chibi entry. I
am specially interested in it since it fits the criteria that I am
using quite well. For that reason Chibi has another entry in the second
table.

More specificly, I have a few questions regarding Chibi.
- Does Chibi use or require some pregenerated files? I do not think so,
but I would like confirmation.
- How would you compare it to S7 and Chicken?
- Have you ever used the TCC compiler? Have you seen the same test
errors as I have? See
https://irvise.xyz/Blog/scheme-implementation-comparison.html#fn.5
- Do you think Chibi would be a good bootstrapping compiler platform for
a programming language?
- Have you used Chibi with Musl libc? I suppose it should just work.
- Finally, I have another person who told me they were having issues
doing a static build. Should we be aware about potential issues?

Thank you for your time. And again, if you have any comments on the
information of that table, please, I would like to know and correct
anything that may be incorrect!

Best regards,
Fernando Oleo Blanco

[John Cowan]

On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 4:22 PM 'Fernando Oleo Blanco' via chibi-scheme <chibi-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I was looking for a Scheme implementation for a project. In the end I
created a comparison table of Scheme implementations in order to help
me decide. You can find the table here:
https://irvise.xyz/Blog/scheme-implementation-comparison.html

You can see a lot of comparisons of many Schemes in many points of detail at <https://docs.scheme.org/surveys/>.   See also ,<https://wingolog.org/archives/2013/01/07/an-opinionated-guide-to-scheme-implementations> for a more impressionistic comparison; be sure to read the comments as well.

 

- Does Chibi use or require some pregenerated files? I do not think so,
  but I would like confirmation.

The .stub files are turned into C files by the chibi-ffi utility; they are used to provide optional packages that interface with C.  They are not required for the interpreter proper.

- How would you compare it to S7 and Chicken?

Chibi accepts the full R7RS standard, whereas S7 accepts only a subset of the older R5RS standard.  Chicken is primarily a compiler, although an interpreter comes with it; it is not designed for embedding, although it has good support for embedded C libraries.

 - Have you used Chibi with Musl libc? I suppose it should just work.

Try it and report back!  Newlib definitely works; it is the libc used by Cygwin, which Chibi supports.

 

- Finally, I have another person who told me they were having issues
  doing a static build. Should we be aware about potential issues?

Again, try and see and report problems you find.  Note that fully static executables are not possible on Mac OS.