Chicken Scheme Websockets

http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/websockets#quick-start-example

by thecombjelly • 12 years ago

115 20 12 years ago

Chicken Scheme uses a technique called "Cheney on the M.T.A." to implement it's garbage collection (and entire language, really). It's one of the most mind-bending things I've ever heard of.

Here's the article: http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/CheneyMTA.html

thecombjelly3• 12 years ago

Here is an article discussing the utilization of this technique specifically for CHICKEN scheme.

http://www.more-magic.net/posts/internals-gc.html

Direct• 12 years ago

This and the paper above were extremely entertaining reads. To the point that I am downloading CHICKEN right now to start exploring. Thank you for those links.

jbert• 12 years ago

Seconded. That is a great read to help improve your understanding of the C runtime environment (stack frames, longjmp etc).

baby• 12 years ago

Why are people still using languages like scheme? I learned that in university and always hated all those parentheses and thought I would never have to use it again.

kryptiskt• 12 years ago

Scheme is used a lot in programming language research because it is a very clean and minimal Lisp. It's a great base for experimenting with new language constructs and compilation techniques.

The parentheses is just a thing to get used to, once you have done that you see the structure, not the characters. It 's also a win for research in that no effort need to be wasted on syntax, which usually isn't the object of study anyway.

glibgil• 12 years ago

Languages like scheme and lisp do not have real syntax, but are more like abstract syntax tree markup languages. That is both the appeal and the dissuasion. Attempts have been made to create syntax for these languages, but it never catches on. https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=alternative+syntax+lisp+%7C+...

ffreire• 12 years ago

This is anecdotal, but I've come to really appreciate the subtle syntax changes that Clojure has adopted. With an editor that provides support for "rainbow" parenthesis I've found Clojure to be the most readable of all the Lisps I've had the pleasure of working with (Guile and Racket among them).

foobarbaz12342• 12 years ago

I am a fan of Scheme but never got that statement. Why do people say Scheme/Lisp has no syntax? I mean clearly it has a _simple_ syntax, i.e. an expression is either an atom (an identifier, a number, a lambda expression, etc.) or a list of expressions, denoated by "(expr0 expr1 ... exprN). I would say it has a simple, well-thought and powerful syntax.

innguest• 12 years ago

I learned that in university

No you didn't. It is a huge misconception to think that just because you attended lectures, that you learned the material.

It's clear from that comment that you did not learn Scheme.

1ris• 12 years ago

thought I would never have to use it again.

See: There is your mistake.

cpach• 12 years ago

To each his own.

klibertp• 12 years ago

No, you didn't learn it. Reminds me of this: http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/confiden...

As for why: because they learned it and are able to recognize problems where using such a language would be beneficial. That's all there is to it, really.

davexunit2• 12 years ago

The example echo server is very elegant.

  (with-websocket
    (lambda ()
      (send-message (string-append "you said: " (receive-message)))))

I'll add "porting Chicken web sockets to GNU Guile" to my ever growing todo list.

agumonkey• 12 years ago

Makes local and remote io ... quite the same.

thecombjelly3• 12 years ago

Thank you. (I'm the author of the library.) It came about after quite a few tries at a good API and with a lot of feedback from other CHICKEN hackers.

It probably isn't very portable right now, unfortunately. It uses a lot of CHICKEN specific things to increase speed and memory efficiency but I'm totally open to making it more portable.

davexunit2• 12 years ago

It came about after quite a few tries at a good API

I'm very familiar with that cycle. I'm writing a game engine in Guile and I am constantly implementing something, throwing it away, and trying again. Every time you get a bit closer to the API you really want.

It probably isn't very portable right now, unfortunately.

That's alright. Portable Scheme is cool, but I prefer using what the implementation gives me instead of restricting myself to RnRS. Especially so for something like networking code.

I might never get around to it, but if I find myself wanting to tackle a new project, I'll give porting this a try.

Chicken Scheme Websockets

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