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Comment by lenkite | Hacker News Reader

I really wish there was a standard Scheme that compiled to native for all desktop and mobile OS'es and also supported multi-threading. Does anyone know about one ?

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Racket does tick some of those boxes:

* it has support for OS-level threads via places[0]

* it can produce binary distributions via `raco distribute`[1] by packing together the interpreter and your compiled code into a single executable

* while the current implementation is based on a bytecode-compiler and VM, I believe the Chez implementation actually compiles to native code (although the whole process is transparent to the user)

* it is possible to run Racket on ARM devices, in fact there was a recent thread[2] about that on the mailing list

I realize this isn't 100% what you're looking for, but Racket does come with many nice features. Alternatively, you might also want to take a look at CHICKEN Scheme[3].

[0]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/parallelism.html#%28part....

[1]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/raco/exe-dist.html

[2]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/racket-users/YEajWJe...

[3]: https://call-cc.org/

LambdaNative is a cross-platform development environment written in Scheme, supporting Android, iOS, BlackBerry 10, OS X, Linux, Windows, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenWrt.

http://www.lambdanative.org/

LambdaNative is a wrapper and abstraction over Gambit Scheme. It does not support multi-core threading.

Well, that was my best shot :(. I'm sorry I don't have an answer then.

You were asking for threads, and gambit has lightweight threads, so I assumed there was a way to use them via ln. Multi-core threading is a different story though.

Yes, it's a bit of a pity that great functional languages like Scheme and even the veteran common LISP are loosing out to modern languages like Kotlin because of lack of support in these critical, functional areas. Especially when REPL based development is so amazingly productive.

A few implementations have native threads

Kawa Scheme - compile to java bytecode - https://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/index.html

Chez Scheme - compile to C - POSIX & Windows - https://cisco.github.io/ChezScheme/

Cyclone Scheme - compile to C - Linux only - https://justinethier.github.io/cyclone/index

Guile - VM + JIT compiler - POSIX & Windows - https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/

Bigloo - compile to C and java bytecode - POSIX, Windows, Mac, Android - https://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Bigloo/

Common Lisp has real threading with a standardized interface via Bordeaux-threads and, with some limitations runs on most of the desktop and mobile operating systems one would expect (the limitation being that most workflows have you write the GUIs in a different language and then call into CL, although EQL is an exception to this rule: https://www.cliki.net/EQL

Does EQL still depend on smoke like common-qt does? Because smoke is so deprecated now that I simply gave up trying to get it to build common-qt on a recent distro.

I don’t think so, it’s built on ECL, so the lisp is compiled to C and then linked to Qt. However, I’m not sure how all the details work.

And, there’s a qt5 version.

I know it's no Scheme, but Clojure seems to be doing OK (+ has solid multi core threading, REPL driven development, is a Lisp etc).

I guess at the end of the day it's very hard to compete with the JVM.

Indeed I miss CL's "live coding" every day since.

but do all applications need multi-core threading? Languages like Python get around this using multiprocess module, which is not the same as "multi-core" threading, but it is probably good enough for a majority of applications.

REPL based development, Interactive development are also features. Multi-core isn't probably the top most thing on everybody's list of things.

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