Reimplementation of Racket to run on top of Chez Scheme | Hacker News Reader

Reimplementation of Racket to run on top of Chez Scheme

github.com

99 pointsigravious16 comments

Discussion from the announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13656397

The project has moved on (both in terms of where the repo is hosted and implementation-wise) so I thought I'd re-submit this. Thanks for pointing to the previous discussion :)

Is there any update blog or something? This is one of those projects I am very exited about, would love to follow the progress.

this https://groups.google.com/d/msg/racket-dev/rkXuHNAmQaA/hjgPZ... looks like the most recent update from matthew. i don't think he's the blogging sort, so following along on racket-dev is likely your best option.

Is it logical to code in Racket vs just coding in Chez Scheme? How much does racket bring to the table on top?

Racket is more an ecosystem of languages and includes DrRacket, the Racket programming environment. There's a ton of documentation: https://docs.racket-lang.org/

For instance Racket can take on the personality of R5RS, R6RS, or R7RS (among others) say.

Edit: Maybe I misunderstood your question?

I don't know Racket, nor Chez Scheme, but I've been wanting to learn one or the other. Now that Racket will just transpile to chez scheme, what's the advantage?

Is there any reason for me to learn Racket instead of chez scheme?

Like there's good reason for using Elm, TypeScirpt, Clojurescript over JavaScript directly. Or F# over C#, or Clojure over Java, etc. Is there similar advantage for Racket over Chez Scheme directly? At first glance it feels to me like no. Like the overhead of Racket not being the first class language of the backend might be a worst con then the slight language features it might have over Chez Scheme (if any). Is that true? That's what I'd like to know.

Thanks.

As far as I'm aware Chez Scheme will become the language engine for the Racket family of languages replacing the current language engine. I mean, Racket used to be PLT Scheme, we're not talking a huge leap language-wise here, it's that the Chez Scheme back-end implementation is of very high quality. Racket has a lot of front-end stuff going on that Chez Scheme doesn't. I'm totally open to correction here from those with more familiarity.

I am far from an expert on these matters. If you dig into the repos and docs that have been linked and read around for a bit you'll have as much knowledge as me :)

Some differences between Racket and Chez:

  - module system 
  - macro system
  - number of available libraries
  - community size

Very interesting! Great timing for myself, as I just pulled the Chez github repo just last night— a whopping 900mb btw!

Chez became a point of interest to me after learning about it's solid performance (can even do whole program optimisation and across library boundaries).

I wonder how feasible it would be to build a Chez target for Clojure?

Most recently it has been open sourced under a GNU license by cisco, and is even on Github.

Looks like good times for Chez and Scheme!

Great! The bulkiness must be because of the length of the commit history rather than a measure of how bloated it is. At least I hope!

Curious, Chez and not some other scheme?

It's very fast and compiles to machine code. The other schemes that can keep up compile via C.

Benchmarks confirm: https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/benchmark.html

He, I forgot to mention that I also use Chez as a backend for Idris. https://github.com/melted/idris-chez

Very cool, thanks for the heads up.

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