Interview with Chicken Scheme Maintainer Sjamaan/Peter Bex

Thanks for another great interview, veqq!

> What do those Lisp books lack?

> it doesn’t go very deeply into e.g. garbage collection and data representation.

> I like to blog about cool techniques that are undiscussed nowadays.

> For example implementing weak references and how to GC them efficiently.

I had the same complaints about the books! They're always so high level. Stuff like garbage collection is simply taken for granted. In a real lisp, it's a core part of the virtual machine.

The blog posts about the chicken garbage collector and data representation are excellent. I really want to read about how chicken's continuations are compiled, hope to see an article there about it someday.

I too have taken up blogging in order to fill those gaps.

> Other stuff I rarely see discussed is how to do FFI and cross-module optimizations

Yeah. Those subjects are deeply interesting but I've never been able to find much material about them.

Wingolog has a post about cross-module partial evaluation in guile.

https://www.wingolog.org/archives/2021/05/13/cross-module-in...

The partial evaluator cannot penetrate foreign functions, which prevents optimizations. It's an argument against FFIs!

> The biggest positive I see right now is the push for digital sovereignty.

> I sincerely hope this will change how people deploy tech, maybe in a more mindful manner.

> But vested interests and inertia will be hard to overcome and really bum me out.

Always nice to find more people who care! If you find a way to avoid feeling bummed out, please share. Things only seem to get more difficult for us...

Good interview, informative and reveals something of the character of the individual. Better writing than typical for interviews of this sort.

But I'm biased. I've used Chicken Scheme for a few years. For the most part, it's been a gratifying experience. For me, Chicken's easy to use and sensible FFI is big part of the reason. The language more than not works for what I aim to achieve.

The Chicken community supports newcomers and old hands when they need it. Harsh responses to queries are rare. As online communities go, it's about as good as it gets.

Unrelated but Where is the ‘Sjamaan’ coming from? Ctrl+f doesn’t give any results. Not familiar with the Chicken/Scheme nomenclature but gives me the yuck’s (most if not all self declared shamans I met were total creeps)