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Comment by jlongster | Hacker News Reader

I built an iPhone game with Scheme, and I have to say, it was the best debugging/development environment I've ever had.

jlongster I was closely following your blog posts about Gambit-scheme on the iphone and was even inspired to try it myself. However this was shortly before Apple changed the developer agreement to add the "stuff that compiles to objective c is not acceptable" clause.

It appears as you have discontinued this project. Was that clause the reason?

here is his blog for reference: http://jlongster.com/legacy/scheme-iphone-apps.html

FWIW, Gambit C compiles to C, not to Objective C. I'm not sure that makes a difference, though.

It wasn't the main reason, but certainly didn't encourage me to keep working on it.

I burned out on Scheme and not having a large community of developers, but I'm starting to work on things again, but not iPhone apps.

Can you elaborate? Is the game in the app store? Github? What dev environment did you use?

There is a small list of games (and other applications) written using Gambit-C Scheme at:

http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Real-w...

Here is an example project on github:

https://github.com/jlongster/gambit-iphone-example

I used Emacs which spawned a REPL connected to a live instance of the app and developed from there. Meaning, the app was running in the simulator/device, and I could evaluate code and instantly see changes.

Did you ever try Chicken? I'm curious about how it compares to Gambit.

I have yet to develop much in Chicken, but I've looked at it closely. It works on a different philosophy, one of more practicality (and less elegance). Because of that, it's matured a lot, and it has tons of libraries which is a huge benefit.

Gambit is more lean and portable, good for uses like compiling to the iPhone (that would be much harder for Chicken).

That said, I would probably use Chicken for my next project.

Ever used smalltalk?

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