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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

It's nice that Scheme garners some attention on HN. It's more useful, however, when someone explains how they used it to build a business. Also, there are lots of Schemes and Lisps. Where does Chicken fit as far as libraries and support? Racket is the Scheme that I hear the most about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_(programming_language)

Are these compatible?

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I have built numerous businesses and websites with chicken scheme. It rocks.

The largest one is a basic CRM for a small niche. It runs super fast and development was a breeze. I run it compiled with a number of optimizations enabled.[0]

My personal website is also built in chicken scheme and runs fast even though it is running in interpreted mode.[1]

[0] https://a.keeptherecords.com/demo, source code: https://github.com/ThomasHintz/keep-the-records

[1] http://thintz.com?hn=t

If by compatible you mean that the code are portable between them, the answer is maybe.

Strict R5RS code that don't use eggs (chicken libraries) has good chances to run on Racket. But note that Racket support stuff that is not even Scheme, hence the change of name from PLT Scheme

Racket supports running multiple (sometimes incompatible) dialects of Scheme through the use of a #lang directive.

If you prefix your program with "#lang racket", you get the definitions for the full Racket language, with all of the extensions and libraries that Racket provides.

But if you want to preserve compatibility with the standard and with other implementations, you can prefix your program with "#lang r5rs". It derives from the same base language as Racket.

http://docs.racket-lang.org/r5rs/r5rs-mod.html

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