Re: [Chicken-users] Chicken and Gambit

[felix winkelmann]

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 20:47:31 +0100, Sunnan <address@hidden> wrote:
> What's the relationship between Chicken and Gambit?
> 

Well, what exactly do you mean with relationship?
Technically, Chicken and Gambit have much in common:
both compile to C and are thus very portable.
In fact, Chicken was initially developed and then bootstrapped
via Gambit, so there are several similarities, for example
the declaration syntax.
Chicken uses a different approach to compilation (called
"Cheney-on-the-MTA", after the paper by Henry Baker [1]).
Gambit generates a driver loop, in some sense comparable
to CPS [2].

Gambit code tends to be faster, at least in unsafe/non-generic
mode. The compiler and the runtime system is highly tuned.
Chicken puts more emphasis on ease of use, good C integration
and easy extensibility.


cheers,
felix


[1] http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/CheneyMTA.html
[2] http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~feeley/papers/tr1078.ps.gz