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Comment by Southy | Hacker News Reader

Great response, I really like chicken when working on Mac or Linux, but it's windows (where I do most of my development) that it struggles.

Some eggs just don't install and the error messages are really bad at that point. Trying to install awful to develop a web api I had to give up, couldn't find a way of getting it installed on windows (no problem on OSX or Ubuntu 18.04)

Installed Portacle and (ql:quickload "hunchentoot") and was up and running in a few minutes.

A lot of lisp-languages could do with an equivalent to Portacle, an opinionated dev environment that you can install and just start coding, an area that Racket is excellent in.

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I've never had a Windows, I'm a Mac nerd, but I'm looking into it for cross-platform binaries.

Option 1: MS has a Linux subsystem now. Problem solved, but maybe not customer-friendly.

Option 2: Cygwin probably works, I've seen John Cowan mention it in IRC.

Option 3: This somewhat messy process: https://wiki.call-cc.org/compiling-chicken-on-windows-xp-wit...

Cygwin is the best option because you can easily access all of the installed binaries for use with GUI emacs running in windows.

But I don't consider that to be a real native option, it is some kind of weird halfway house that sort of installs linux binaries but they are also kind of windows ones polluting your windows path.

Currently SBCL 'just works' on native windows, which puts it ahead for me if you are happy with both Scheme and CL.

Option 4: Use msys2 which lets you install/build a bunch of Scheme implementations, e.g. http://wiki.call-cc.org/msys2.

I really wanted to love Chicken but I remember finding a number of eggs I wanted to use that were broken for OSX. If I were a better programmer I guess maybe I could have figured it out.

Which eggs? I'm on Mac, and in Chicken 5 currently, everything has "just worked". SDL required me to hit the SDL site for the frameworks, the rest I've used have had no external requirements.

I wish I could remember which eggs, it's been about a year since I've moved on.

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