I'm curious why people don't prefer Chez Scheme to Racket if it is so fast and can make real binaries (I think anyway). Maybe because until recent it was proprietary. Racket is cool, but I already have Python which is similar from a performance perspective. Chez with the Racket ecosystem might be worth a switch.
Is python really that similar from a performance perspective? The highly scientific benchmarks game cough seems to suggest Racket is usually an order of magnitude faster
Speed is probably not your most pressing concern if you're using Scheme, I think.
Moreover, Racket has the best ecosystem out of all the schemes, with lots of high quality and maintained libraries and a massive standard library, and it's not only a language, but also a platform for creating DSLs fully integrated with its IDE, DrRacket.
Also, Racket can create standalone binaries (though they don't make programs any faster).
No, it cannot currently. It makes boot files which still need to be launched with scheme / petite.
The build + library/module system with chez is also pretty unusable. If you want to write scheme for a system where you deploy an entire OS, it's not too much to work around. If you're trying to write a 1-off binary, you should go with chicken.
In my own restricted view (I didn't play with may scheme implementations) Racket has some serious non-strictly-technical winning point that make it feasible for non-toy applications:
* Well-written, comprehensive language and package documentation
* Tooling
* Included libraries (example: I didn't expect racket to have libraries for imap... but it's there, in the standard package)
A nice development would be same-process parallelism. Afaik, at the moment you can have concurrent "threads" within the same process, but you need to spawn multiple racket vm processes to get parallelism (this is done "under the hood" by the racket vm, they call this things "Places").
> I'm curious why people don't prefer Chez Scheme to Racket if it is so fast and can make real binaries (I think anyway).
Just a FYI for those following along at home, racket comes with built-in support for bundling programs as executables - but as I understand it those are really archives with a vm and (byte?)code.
I recently tried on Windows, and a "hello world" graphical app was a ~11mb - not bad IMNHO - but bigger than the equivalent Lazarus / free pascal app.
I'm glad I've stuck with Racket. The work on it continues to surprise me in many ways. I have Chez and Racket on my box, and Wasp Lisp. Now I can look forward to a fast Racket with scheme code I can dig into vs. C, which I am only ok at.
The benchmarks for Chez Scheme are pretty impressive. Provided Racket-on-Chez is able to captitalize on that, this is pretty exciting.
Also, that makes it hypothetically possible that HN could end up running on Chez's VM because HN is written in Arc, which is I believe written in Racket, which may in the next year be written for Chez Scheme's VM.
[+] [-] throwaway7645|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lacampbell|9 years ago|reply
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...
[+] [-] steinuil|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codemac|9 years ago|reply
No, it cannot currently. It makes boot files which still need to be launched with scheme / petite.
The build + library/module system with chez is also pretty unusable. If you want to write scheme for a system where you deploy an entire OS, it's not too much to work around. If you're trying to write a 1-off binary, you should go with chicken.
[+] [-] znpy|9 years ago|reply
* Well-written, comprehensive language and package documentation
* Tooling
* Included libraries (example: I didn't expect racket to have libraries for imap... but it's there, in the standard package)
A nice development would be same-process parallelism. Afaik, at the moment you can have concurrent "threads" within the same process, but you need to spawn multiple racket vm processes to get parallelism (this is done "under the hood" by the racket vm, they call this things "Places").
[+] [-] zem|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catnaroek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e12e|9 years ago|reply
Just a FYI for those following along at home, racket comes with built-in support for bundling programs as executables - but as I understand it those are really archives with a vm and (byte?)code.
I recently tried on Windows, and a "hello world" graphical app was a ~11mb - not bad IMNHO - but bigger than the equivalent Lazarus / free pascal app.
[+] [-] abecedarius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codemac|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eggy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abhi18av|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peatmoss|9 years ago|reply
Also, that makes it hypothetically possible that HN could end up running on Chez's VM because HN is written in Arc, which is I believe written in Racket, which may in the next year be written for Chez Scheme's VM.
[+] [-] Johnny_Brahms|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoelMcCracken|9 years ago|reply
Not sure if that's still true, but AFAIK all work on arc has been stalled for quite a while.
[+] [-] codemac|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] na85|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abhi18av|9 years ago|reply