Re: [Chicken-users] Advantages of CHICKEN over Gambit-C

[felix winkelmann]

On 3/27/06, Matthew David Parker <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hello, I am wondering if someone could briefly list some of the advantages
> of CHICKEN over Gambit.  So far I see that the CHICKEN compiler is much
> easier to work with, and I think performance might be more consistant, and
> CHICKEN has a bunch of eggs.  All of the optional scheme functions in
> CHICKEN seem much better, with more intuitive names, like "random" and
> "randomize" and "system".
> Gambit has the immediately obvious advantages of the numeric tower and a
> nice interpreter with edit-line abilities (like "read-line"), all under
> LGPL, but it's much harder to work with the compiler and extensions, and I
> was wondering if "under the hood" it's not as good as chicken.  I made my
> own easy SDL interface for both CHICKEN and Gambit and ran the same little
> game on both, and it seems choppy on gambit, and smooth and consistant on
> Chicken.

Well, that sounds good!

Chicken has a pretty fast garbage collector, but depending on memory
load, the pauses can be noticable. Note that gambit will generate faster
code in most cases, provided the right declarations are given (declaring
`standard-bindings', 'extended-bindings', `unsafe', `fixnum' will often give
significant performance boosts ). Gambit is a sleek piece of software,
but suffers from one big problem: its design is performance driven (Feeley
is a performance junkie), which (IMHO) shows in the syntax and semantics of the
library it offers.
CHICKEN is making some performance tradeoffs to provide more convenience
and is heavily library oriented and appears (at least to me) more "open".
So, naturally, I prefer it over gambit. :-)

But in the end you have to make your own choice, of course.


cheers,
felix