[Chicken-users] Chicken 2.5 released

[felix winkelmann]

The CHICKEN Scheme-to-C compiler, Version 2.5 is now
available at <http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org>.

Things changed since the last release (2.41):

- Bugfixes
- CHICKEN can now be built using CMake <http://www.cmake.org>, in fact CMake
 is required to built CHICKEN from sources on Windows with the Microsoft
 tools or mingw32
- the whole build process has been cleaned up and simplified
- the "easyffi" and "tinyclos" library units have been removed from the base
 system and are now available as separate extensions
- the deprecated "set-dispatch-read-syntax!" has been removed
- Will Farr cleaned up the behaviour of number-type specific numeric operations
 ("fx..."/"fp...") with respect to safe/unsafe mode
- added "(finite? NUMBER)"
- the "$" macro moved into its own separate extension
- the values of "software-type", "software-version", "machine-type"
and "machine-byte-order"
 are now registered as features and can be tested using "cond-expand" or "#+"
- all tools now support the "-release" option
- chicken-setup: added "-test" option

Special thanks to Brandon Van Every, who put considerable effort into the
CHICKEN build system and who ported it to CMake completely from scratch.
The installation instructions and build file are extensively documented and may
serve as a tutorial for creating non-trivial software projects with CMake.
Thanks, Brandon! Also thanks to Bill Hoffmann and Brad King from Kitware
for their support.

Many thanks to Peter Bex, Toby Butzon, Thomans Chust, John Cowan,
Alejandro Forero Cuervo,
dgym, Alex Drummond, Mario Domenech Goulart, Kon Lovett, Benedikt
Rosenau and Zbigniew
Szadkowski for reporting bugs, suggesting improvements and contributing fixes.


Features:

- Generates tail-recursive C with full support for first-class
 continuations and multiple values (Using the translation
 scheme as described in Henry Baker's paper "Cheney on the M.T.A.").
- Fairly R5RS compliant.
- Support for SRFIs 0, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
17, 18, 19,
 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 47, 55, 57, 60,
 61, 62, 63, 66, 69, 72 and 78.
- Record structures, hash-tables, queues, custom I/O ports, extended string
 operations, regular expressions, TCP sockets and more...
- Provides an object system with multiple inheritance, multimethods and a
 Meta-Object-Protocol (based on Gregor Kiczales' TinyCLOS).
- Lightweight threads (based on call/cc).
- High portability (known to work on Windows, Linux, Free/Net/Open BSD,
 Solaris, SunOS, MAC OS X, HP-UX, IRIX and probably many more. Supported
 processors include x86, AMD64, Sparc, PA-RISC, Alpha, ARM, IA64, S/390, MIPS
 and PowerPC).
- Freely available under the BSD license.
- A POSIX interface (partially available for Windows)
- Powerful pattern matching macros.
- `syntax-case' macros and module system
- Generation of profiling information.
- A extensive Foreign Function Interface with callbacks, finalization,
 user defined foreign type converters, locatives, embedding of C code inside
 Scheme programs, statically allocated (non GC'd) Scheme data and the
 possibility of embedding compiled Scheme code into other applications.
- On many systems compiled code can be loaded dynamically into a running
 application.
- Uses a simple static linking system that allows easy creation of self-
 contained executables.
- The compiler can be customized in various ways.
- Support for writing interpreted or compiled UNIX shell scripts or
 Windows batch files.
- A separate utility allows straightforward download, build and installation
 of extension libraries.


Limitations:

- No unlimited-precision integers (bignums), rationals or complex numbers
 (available seperately as an extension)
- No support for unicode (also available separately)
- Procedures can not have more than 126 arguments (more on certain platforms or
 when libffi is available).
- Compilation of large files is quite slow.


Extensions and libraries:

 Check out <http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/eggs/index.html>
 for a rapidly growing list of readily packaged extensions for CHICKEN.

 Currently available:

 F-operator ajax alexpander amb aquaterm args asxt autoload array-lib
awk base64 bb binary-parse blas
 bloom-filter box c3 cairo charconv chicken codewalk coerce complex
content-type cookie crc crypt
 crypt3 csv datatype debug defstruct dissector doctype dollar dpfw
easyffi eggdoc environments epeg
 estraier expat ezxdisp fastcgi format format-modular fp ftp futures
g2 gdbm generalised-case generator
 gettext glut gmp hashes honu hostinfo html-plots html-stream
htmlprag http iconv imlib2 inline irc iset
 japi javahack job-worker jni json kanren lalr lazy-ffi levenshtein
lightning lirc-client locale logging
 lookup-table loop macosx magic mailbox make man mapm match-action
matcher mathh md5 meroon message-digest
 mime metakit metaphone misc-extn miscmacros mistie modules mole
mpd-client mysql nbstdin ncurses numbers
 objc object-apply oblist openal opengl openssl orders packedobjects
packrat pcap perfect-hash phoghorn
 pipeline pmatch pop3 postgresql ppi procedure-surface prometheus
proplist protobj pty q-lang q
 r6rs-libraries readline regex-case remote-launch remote-mailbox
rfc3339 rfc822 rgraph ripemd rlimit rpc
 rss s11n sandbox sassy schelog scheme-dissect sdl sedna sfio sha1
sha2 silex simple-macros slib smtp
 softscheme spiffy spiffy-utils spread sql sqlite sqlite3
sqlite3-tinyclos srfi-19 srfi-25 srfi-27 srfi-29
 srfi-37 srfi-38 srfi-40 srfi-42 srfi-45 srfi-47 srfi-57 srfi-60
srfi-66 srfi-78 ssax stack stream-base64
 stream-cgi stream-ext stream-flash stream-flash-tree-map
stream-htpasswd stream-httplog stream-ldif
 stream-parser stream-sections stream-wiki structures suspension
svn-client svn-post-commit-hooks sx
 sxml-match sxml-tools sxml-transforms sxpath synch syntax-case tar
tabexpand tagged-begin
 test-infrastructure tcc tcp-server tcp6 testeez tiger-hash tinyclos
tk udp unix-sockets uri url utf8
 uuid-lib uuid-ossp vector-lib web-scheme wt-tree xlib xmi xml-rpc
xosd xxexpr z3


The current development version can be accessed through the "darcs"
revision control
system (available at <http://www.darcs.net>), like this:

 $ darcs get http://galinha.ucpel.tche.br/chicken

If you prefer subversion (<http://subversion.tigris.org>) access, get
it like this:

 $ svn co https://galinha.ucpel.tche.br/svn/chicken-eggs/chicken

(Username is "anonymous", enter <RETURN> when asked for a password)

See the file README.darcs for details on how to bootstrap the system.

A special thanks to Mario Domenech Goulart and the Universidade
Catolica de Pelotas for
providing the server that hosts the source repository!


The mailing list for CHICKEN users can be found here:

 To post a message send e-mail to <address@hidden>

 General information about the mailing list is at
 <http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users>

A mailing list specific to CHICKEN development and porting is available at:

 <http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-hackers>


Bug reports, suggestions and comments would be very welcome. Contact me at
<address@hidden>


cheers,
felix

--
http://galinha.ucpel.tche.br:8081/blog/blog.ssp