Chezscheme 9.5 in Debian Testing
packages.debian.org
packages.debian.org
You do not have to wait for your package manager to catch up.
> Since the Scheme sources can be compiled only by a working version of Chez Scheme, it's not actually possible to build Chez Scheme from source. That's why the boot and header files are packaged with the sources.
Chez has a bootstrapping problem. (See also https://bootstrappable.org)
The site's intention is nice in theory but not really feasible in practice. To get an OS running on a computer, you need binaries anyways, so having some more binaries for programming languages isn't really that bad. There also isn't even an easily bootstrappable C compiler afaik.
They've gotten really far, though. Jan's Mes can compile tcc which can compile an older version of GCC. They just need enough of a C compiler to compile MesC.
https://gitlab.com/janneke/mes
"To get an OS running on a computer, you need binaries anyways, so having some more binaries for programming languages isn't really that bad. "
That's what I keep telling folks obsessed with this. If they insist on non-binary solutions, David A. Wheeler and I talked about using scripting languages that come with the system. I was looking at Perl with him mentioning bash. I added bash, Tcl, and awk compilers to the bootstrapping collection just in case. That's on top of the usual like Forth, LISP, or META II. People put some small, C compilers in there like you were talking about.
If you don't have a binary executable of a C compiler, you can't compile a C compiler, such as GCC.
Since Guile requires C, you need a binary C compiler at the very least to bootstrap it from the bare minimum.
Chez Scheme requires a compiled Chez Scheme whereas Guile requires a compiled C compiler.
I'd say that this is a desirable property as it allows for an elegant reduction of the bootstrap problem; conversely a program requiring a version of itself to be built has a much more complicated bootstrap story that either involves trust in large binaries or recursion into the early days of the compiler's first implementations.
(GHC matches the latter story, unfortunately.)
You do need a C compiler, but there is work underway to bootstrap the C compiler with ... a C compiler written in Scheme :) This Scheme interpreter (called "mes") can be built with the M2 Planet transpiler:
https://gitlab.com/janneke/mes/ https://github.com/oriansj/m2-planet
The designer can hardly choose it such that a language can be bootstrapped without the use of any prior executable.