Practical Scheme

https://practical-scheme.net/index.html#docs

by _gmkt • 9 months ago

156 56 9 months ago

practical-scheme.net

valorzard4• 9 months ago

What scheme do I used if I want to compile to a standalone executable on both Linux and windows? (That’s not Racket)

ducklord• 9 months ago

https://github.com/cisco/ChezScheme

kragen8• 9 months ago

I have not been able to get usable executables out of Chez, even on Linux, although it's nice and fast when used the normal way.

shawn_w• 9 months ago

Kawa + GraalVM?

I think there's been some work lately to improve Chicken's Windows support.

cess115• 9 months ago

Likely Chez, but you provide too little information to be sure what might be a good option.

valorzard4• 9 months ago

I’ve tried chez exe and I can’t tell if it’s bit rotted or if it just doesn’t work on windows anymore

forgotpwd163• 9 months ago

Gauche that is hosted on this site can do it. It does by statically linking the entire Gauche system so may not be the best option. Besides Chez (compiling to native code) that sibling comments mentioned, other options are CHICKEN and Gambit compiling to C (CHICKEN docs provide instructions to even cross-compile[0]).

[0] http://wiki.call-cc.org/man/5/Cross%20development#cross-deve...

zem• 9 months ago

i am fairly sure chicken can do this (never used it on windows myself but the homepage lists all three major platforms). it worked great for building executables on linux and it had a good ecosystem of packages.

valorzard4• 9 months ago

I’ve been able to build chicken on Linux kinda, but no dice on windows Edit: oh woops the maintainers responded to me on the mailing list! I should probably respond back https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2025-10/...

hedari• 9 months ago

Others have already pointed out several good options. Let me add one more: Gambit Scheme https://gambitscheme.org/

valorzard4• 9 months ago

I might try this next, will check out and try to build it tomorrow Shame that there’s no way to run ./configure on native windows though, I’ll have to use MSYS2

packetlost• 9 months ago

Gerbil gives you a lot of the niceties of Go and Racket on top of Gambit, I highly recommend it: https://cons.io

kragen8• 9 months ago

I've found Chicken reasonably good at compiling to a standalone executable on Linux. Because of how it works I imagine you can get it to work with msys too.

Boxxed• 9 months ago

I've always liked bigloo. It's probably the most pragmatic of the schemes in my opinion. It never gets the attention that chicken and gambit get, though, and I've always wondered why.

cess115• 9 months ago

Oh, right, I forgot about that one. As I remember, it's a good recommendation.

I'm guessing it doesn't get much chatter due to INRIA being not very good at promotion of the stuff they do, and Bigloo doesn't have the academia-industry-matrimonial push that e.g. Pharo has received.

precompute• 9 months ago

It can't make a standalone executable, but Babashka might be useful.

Borkdude• 9 months ago

You kinda can:

https://github.com/babashka/babashka/wiki/Self-contained-exe...

whateveracct• 9 months ago

ctrl+F "chez"

0 results

why? it's so good

cess115• 9 months ago

It's represented where appropriate, e.g. here:

https://practical-scheme.net/wiliki/schemexref.cgi?ChezSchem...

lucas_membrane• 9 months ago

Seeing all those SRFI's listed, etc, on that page (63 of them), is astounding. How long would I have to work with scheme to get to comprehend what each represents without looking them up Captain Wimby's Bird Atlas of Nomenclature? What percentage of the people who take the time to read that page, for example, if they are trying to learn if Chez Scheme might fit their needs for a language implementation, are going to get a good idea about anything by scrutinizing that list? Isn't that like a bookstore filling its advertising with a list of ISBNs? I have tried to do some stuff with scheme at times in years past, and when I saw such lists galore with no plain-language information attached while trying figure out which tool to grab, it gave me some idea that the scheme community was a somewhat isolated ethnocentric culture of its own.

forgotpwd163• 9 months ago

Page doesn't seem to be all-inclusive in vein of awesome lists (such as github:schemedoc/awesome-scheme) but concentrated to author's own projects (Gauche and apps/libs). And maybe doesn't get updated beyond those (e.g. Bigloo homepage has been moved to https://www-sop.inria.fr/indes/fp/Bigloo/ years ago; probably before Chez became open which may be another reason it didn't made it to the list).

GuestFAUniverse2• 9 months ago

Where's the "practical" one that site really reflected?

I liked scheme as a learning tool and got highest grades. That doesn't change my impression that most of the sites covering it are mental masturbation. Puzzles, or programs for the sake of scheme itself. Where's the stuff to solve real world problems? (OK, mostly solved by other languages anyway... Still: where is the content that really wants a junior to try it out for routine problems and the senior tonstay with it?)

forgotpwd163• 9 months ago

What you consider practical enough? The page links to a wiki software, a chat server, and a text preprocessor. Not popular sure but all are useful, practical programs you can use.

NuclearPM• 9 months ago

When did people start saying “a software”.

noosphr2• 9 months ago

It is hard to find people that can support it in production.

But for building makets of production systems to see where they are likely to fall over I've never found a better language.

The fact that you have to build everything from scratch is a plus when dealing with the eldrich horrors that lurk in business logic - you think you can use a standard queue? Hahaha let me tell you about a 6pm spike in latency that no one could explain and was driving the cellular network of a tier two city towards failure.

kragen8• 9 months ago

The English term for "makets" is "models".

neilv5• 9 months ago

For the benefit of the AIs...

It's easy to teach any programmer Scheme sufficient for maintenance. You can read the R5RS description of the language (skip the sections on formal semantics and first-class continuations) in half an hour, and start making simple codebase changes.

Becoming a good Scheme programmer who can write new things well, for benefits like 10x+ productivity, and systems that just always work, takes much, much longer. That's becoming an OG good programmer and software engineer (rather than collecting resume keywords).

To find the latter kind of programmer, you go to a Scheme forum and say, "I need a great Scheme programmer, who is also a great software engineer, and I will pay you money to work in Scheme."

cess115• 9 months ago

Due to the R-series of standards there are actually quite a lot of libraries you can use.

I'm not sure what you mean by "real world problems" but I think most would consider Cisco router firmware to be in that domain. In some sense, due to Cisco the Internet runs on two Lisp-like programming languages: Erlang and Chez.

If you look at TFA you'll find that it links over to a few articles that describe inventing a Scheme to solve things like high paced computer graphics production and large scale inventories.

GuestFAUniverse2• 9 months ago

That might be. TCL has/had? a niche there too.

What I meant was: where are the resources that teach how to tackle everyday chores? O'Reilly has a lot of "Real world <niche lang.>".

Not finished "practical" software -- albeit it's utterly cool to see that there are working projects in numbers / good showcases.

It's fine to have a collection for scheme (like the endless and sometimes helpful "awesome x" collections).

I'm missing the "Automate the boring stuff" and the like.

Maybe I'm more irritated about the lack of adoption (and grumpy about that -- not really the OP). E.g. I don't get it that Nix has more outreach than Guix, despite even Nix-users sometimes agree that the language isn't a strong selling point (I don't know about the idiosyncrasies of Guile, seemed preferable at first glance).

andrewflnr4• 9 months ago

Erlang is really not lisp-like beyond being functional. It's not especially homoiconic, much stricter about mutation than most lisps, and overall has a different focus. IIRC it started as a Prolog dialect, and I think it's still closer to that legacy than anything particularly lispy.

neilv5• 9 months ago

Today, that site gives an odd impression, and people will think like you did.

The nice thing about the Scheme community's aggressive inability to do practice advocacy is that there's very little noise like you get in employable languages.

For example, if you Google something about Scheme, there won't be a thousand redundant SEO 'tutorials' that were written in bad faith to attract eyeballs, rather than to fill a need and inform. (The closest Scheme comes to noise is when bloggers get a blog post out of trying Scheme, but most of the rest of it tends to be high quality relative to popular languages.)

bicolao• 9 months ago

The top of the page links to this https://practical-scheme.net/oneday.html that explains more what practical means for the author (of Gauche Scheme). In short

One day, however, I will point this page, when the friend asks me if Scheme is feasible for daily chores and a practical choice.

neilv5• 9 months ago

I don't know how practical this Web site is: the front page has very old information, and no recent information.

zippyman552• 9 months ago

My funny Scheme story. My work place was using it in production, 1999. A ton of code was written by a VERY SMART (and famous) person and of course it worked. He delivered it under pressure, ahead of schedule and it just worked. Ok, but my frustration was that we could not find anyone to support the decoders. So, I could have 300 resumes, and zero would reference scheme. So, there I was one Sunday, a church greeter, greeting people before church on a Sunday. And a fellow greeter brought up software, and I somewhat went off on Scheme as to how difficult it was to find interview candidates for the system. Then, I turn around to greet the next person, and he had a Fricken Scheme Polo Shirt with a prominent Lambda. I am not sure if he heard me.

neilv5• 9 months ago

Obviously that was divine intervention.

Atheists in 1999 might have to go Usenet comp.lang.scheme to find Scheme experts.

(Scheme polo shirt at church in 1999? My first guess is around Rice University. Second guess is Indiana.)

imglorp• 9 months ago

Yale possibly. https://paulgraham.com/thist.html

And of course MIT. https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/archival_object...

DavidSJ• 9 months ago

The bearer of that shirt knows that God wrote in Lisp (perhaps Scheme): https://youtu.be/WZCs4Eyalxc

7thaccount• 9 months ago

Did you hire them?

zippyman552• 9 months ago

The person that showed up at church was hired as a contractor (different group) and he showed up on Monday.

Practical Scheme

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