Lobsters Interview with Sjamaan

40 points by veqq 23 hours ago on lobsters | 4 comments

that was an enjoyable interview. I dabbled in chicken for a bit and still maintain a soft spot for it, it's probably the nicest of the pure schemes I've tried using, though in the overall lisp family I fill prefer racket.

pervognsen | 18 hours ago

I guess I could be non-lazy and look this up but in the spirit of engaging: Does CHICKEN still use the "Cheney on the MTA" approach where it compiles to C and implements continuations with CPS and dynamic allocations with alloca on the C stack, treating stack overflows as a trigger for stack-copying GC? Assuming I'm remembering that correctly. If so, how has that worked out over the years? I mostly stopped using or following Scheme in the mid-2000s, so the quirky compilation approach is what I remember it for the most, as a compiler nerd.

lcapaldo | 7 hours ago

This is mentioned in the interview above in the answer to the question of “Why CHICKEN?”

CHICKEN is also one of two (as far as we know) implementations that use the Cheney on the MTA technique explained here.

tentacloids | 8 hours ago

Just want to show my appreciation for your contributions to CHICKEN. I used it for my BSc at version 4.something and only recently decided to pick it up again, using pure r7rs mode on 5.4, for my pet language. It's got a bit of the characteristic jank of C-compilation, but it's also everything and more you'd want from a Scheme.

Also I like a nuanced assessment of Clojure, particularly of its social impact being its most important feature. It's heartening to see people rally around such a strange little creature.