Comment by carloscm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carloscm | Hacker News Reader

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Guile looked to me firmly in the "midweight" category I mention in the article. I don't doubt it's a very good interpreter, in the same vein of Gambit or Chicken, but it required a combined size/platform commitment way above I was considering. Basically anything more complex than S7 is playing in a different league than little single-file interpreters like TinyScheme or femtolisp. If I had to start from scratch I would certainly consider a bigger, much more capable platform, but it's really late in the development of the game to add it.

I didn't know about ypsilon! The incremental/short pause GC looks very interesting indeed (although for the current usage in The Spatials I run TinyScheme as part of the map generation and then I completely unload it, so no GC, all the script logic gets encoded into command-like objets inside the C++ heap). But it appears it hasn't been developed for awhile. Still it's quite small, I will definitely look into in the future.

Have you looked at Chibi-Scheme? http://synthcode.com/scheme/chibi/

Yep, and discarded it early. From the home page:

Windows (under Cygwin)

This is usually code for "needs UNIX/POSIX APIs", or its uglier cousin, "uses C99". I wouldn't mind Mingw32, and would mind a little bit Cygwin, but the problem is that for a video game I can't even begin to consider those platforms for Windows. All the official platform SDKs, or the third party ones (think Steam) require the Microsoft compilers and libs.

The Microsoft compiler supports C99 since version 2013.

Partially, mostly in the library area. It still has some troubles with actual C99 code:

http://bellecrazysnail.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/some-thought...

There's also some weird double personality issues going on with their compilers in MSVC2013, for example they support designated initializers in plain C but not in C++. So you get partial C99 inside pure C or C89 (MS flavored) under C++.

I forgot where I read the quote, but for a decade Microsoft saw the plain C compiler as tool exclusively meant for Windows development. While gcc and later clang adopted and embraced new C idioms, like the struct syntax I mention, they kept their plain C support frozen in time.

I also found weird behavior in MSVC when pushing the C preprocessor VERY hard (nested variadic macros. That would require an entire blog post for itself...)

It builds under Mingw32 as well, and at least an earlier version built with VC++ without modification (I don't have access to a windows machine right now to verify). It also builds under Plan 9, which uses a very old and basic C compiler very far from C99.

Some of the optional extension libraries like networking may not work out of the box, but TinyScheme doesn't have these anyway.

Basically, Chibi was designed as a better TinyScheme. It's just as small, can also easily be included statically without a library, has a nicer (optional) FFI, various features like full Unicode, full numeric tower and hygienic macros (all optional), and is an order of magnitude faster.

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