[Chicken-users] Re: Choosing chicken

[Brandon Van Every]

On 6/2/07, Jens Axel Søgaard <address@hidden> wrote:
> [I am not on the Chicken mailing list, so I am responding
> directly - feel free to any response to the mailing list]
>
> Brandon Van Every wrote:
> > On 6/2/07, Alex Queiroz <address@hidden> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > In summary:
> >> > - Windows support
> >> > - retargettability
> >> >
> >>
> >>      Isn't PLT's Windows support as good as or better than Chicken's?
> >
> > Looks that way.  For the Windows build, it looks like they're Visual
> > Studio 2005 .sln files.  I don't know how disciplined the PLT guys are
> > about keeping their .sln builds working, but it is typical in such
> > projects for the manually maintained Windows build to fall behind the
> > Autoconf build.
>
> PLT has an automated build system that each night builds what is in
> the current SVN. You can download these builds from this page:
>
>      <http://pre.plt-scheme.org/installers/>
>
> Build errors are therefore caught *very* quickly.

Ouch well then they're certainly ahead in that respect.  Nightly
builds and automated testing systems are only wish list for Chicken.
CMake has the infrastructure to do all of that elegantly, but nobody
has the inclination to actually implement it.  I've had it as a task
in our bug tracker for awhile, but recently I abdicated responsibility
for it, as it's a huge task and I must look to more $$$$$ things right
now.

>  > CMake is a unified build system and much less likely
> > to fall behind on any given platform, although it is possible if a
> > platform-specific build bug happens.   Also for PLT if you want VS
> > .NET 2003, or god forbid, VS 6, you're SOL.
>
> I have a healthy scepticism of everything related to Microsoft, but
> if it builds with the free Microsoft compiler, why wouldn't it
> build with VS6?

Because PLT has a VS 2005 build file, and those files are not
backwards compatible to earlier versions of MSVC.  You'd have to
figure it out yourself.  If you do figure it out, you'll have to
maintain it yourself, as the canonical PLT build isn't dealing with
it.  With Chicken and CMake the choice of compiler is a non-issue.
One build supports all compilers, including all the different MSVC
versions.

> > Once upon a time, PLT's performance wasn't as good as Chicken's.  I
> > don't know about now.
> >
> > Chicken has some inherent ability to talk to C++.  As far as I know,
> > PLT doesn't.
>
> Are you thinking ABI here?

No, I'm saying Chicken understands some C++ constructs.  That's one of
the reasons I went with Chicken over other things.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every