Re: [Chicken-users] Unfair question: best Lisp for web development?

[Tobia Conforto]

Graham Fawcett wrote:
> Chicken is a very Unix-friendly Scheme, and I find my Chicken apps  
> are easy to maintain from a sysadmin perspective. The few Common  
> Lisp apps I had (they were in SBCL, which is beautiful in its way,  
> but weighs
> 800 pounds) were troublesome to manage as processes, ate huge swaths  
> of memory, and were not particularly efficient.

This is very very important for average real-world projects.  My  
experience with Chicken is that it is as Unix- (or OS-) friendly as  
Perl, as performant as C, and as high-level as any other Lisp, without  
the bloat of CL.  I have yet to find another Lisp with all these  
properties, and that's why I'm sticking with it!

To add something useful to this thread, although not Chicken-specific,  
I recently wrote a web app with a piece of highly interactive client- 
side interface, using Canvas, Javascript, and lots of linear algebra.   
Naturally I prototyped most of the client-side maths code in Chicken,  
well knowing that I would have to translate it to Javascript when the  
algorithms were finalized.  But then I stumbled upon Scheme2Js and my  
day was made :-)

http://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/personnel/Florian.Loitsch/scheme2js/

It would be interesting to port it from Bigloo to Chicken.  In the  
meantime you can just use one of the precompiled versions.  It's sweet  
to be able write your client-side model (or logic) layer in Scheme and  
have it compiled to Javascript as part of your make process.

Also, that compiler uses a very clever trick to translate call/cc into  
Javascript.


Tobia