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One thing is the relatively large number of packages available for Chicken, especially for C libraries on UNIX. Therefore many use Chicken for systems and desktop programming on UNIX.

A list of packages (called "eggs") is available at http://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-projects/egg-index-4.html

(Disclaimer: I don't know much about Gambit, and cannot comment on their respective implementation capabilities.)

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Gambit is extremely fast, that's its main benefit over the competition. It's ecosystem is... very rough, though.

Gambit also has (imho) a much easier FFI. (Once you get used to all the ___arg1 and ___result stuff.) So it really is easy to bolt on C -- and even C++ and Objective-C -- code to a Gambit app.

True enough. I have used Gambit for several apps in the last 10 years or so, but always for things that don't need a lot of 3rd party libraries. I wrote an article a long time ago on using Gambit for command line utilities and other small apps.

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