[Chicken-users] Was crunch really discontinued? Is there an alternative?

[Jeronimo Pellegrini]

Hello!

I've been looking for some Scheme implementation that is suitable
for number crunching and also supports SRFIs like 42 (eager
comprehension), 45 (laziness), 25 (multidimensional arrays),
and some others.

So, I have tested Chicken, Bigloo and Gambit. There seems to be a
necessary trade-off between number of SRFIs and number-chunching speed,
unfortunately.

I have written a program that repeatedly multiply matrices as a
very simplistic benchmark (because it is the kind of thing I'd like
to do very fast). The result was:

bigloo  0.52s
gambit  2.70s
chicken 8.70s

This is for compiled Scheme, with all possible optimizations turned
on.

The problem is that if it takes 1 hour for C code, I would then
expect at least the same for bigloo, and at least 17 times more for
Chicken -- or something close to that (it may even be a lot less,
like 10 hours, but it's still too much time, unfortunately).

So, going through the mailing list archives I learned about crunch,
which seems to be awesome, but was being discontinued as of February:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2009-02/msg00082.html
(This would be my #1 option!)

And I also found messages mentioning Pre-Scheme:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2009-02/msg00109.html

But neither of them is listed as an Egg in the eggs index here:
http://chicken.wiki.br/chicken-projects/egg-index-4.html

So, my question is -- was crunch really discontinued? What about the
Pre-Scheme extension? Or is there anything similar?

Thank you a lot!
J.