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by anuragramdasan 4486 days ago
My lisp experience has been largely restricted to writing elisp. I would really love to write something in Scheme though. How well maintained and diverse are the GambitScheme libraries? I see three different sets on their packages page, do you have any experience with those or would you have some better suggestions?
2 comments
Touche 4486 days ago
> How well maintained and diverse are the GambitScheme libraries?

The library situation in Gambit is.... very bad. Last time I tried it (~6 months ago) you had to compile from a different branch to get Blackhole to work.

Chicken Scheme has a much better ecosystem. It also compiles to C and is fast. Gambit is known for its speed so I won't say Chicken is as fast but it is "fast enough" and the ecosystem is worth the difference IMO.

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klibertp 4485 days ago
Seconded. I recently evaluated quite a few Scheme implementations for a very simple web scraping project and found Chicken to be both fast and great with its packages. chicken-install feels almost like pip or npm and it works really well. The packages are many and most of them are nicely documented. If you need a Scheme with compile-to-C capability and a bunch of batteries included then Chicken Scheme is the way to go.
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rrradical 4486 days ago
I didn't use many libraries. It's pretty straightforward to interface with C code, so instead of writing a whole OpenGL wrapper, I just call into some C code to handle the rendering.

It was somewhat tricky to get it all setup, but I followed in the footsteps of James Long (http://jlongster.com/s/jlongster-old/pages/blog/write-apps-i...) and a few others.

I hope to contribute back what I learned and make it easier for others to use it for games in the future. It's seriously a great language for game writing.

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anuragramdasan 4485 days ago
I agree. I would love to someday be able to build on mobile using games. It would be amazing if you could share a writeup or maybe a hello world starter template on running Gambit on iOS or android. This seems like a lovely project. Congratulations and good luck.
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Turing_Machine 4486 days ago
Would love to see it! I ran across Long's page some time ago, but unfortunately it's way out of date.
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