CHICKEN is a compiler for the Scheme programming language. CHICKEN produces portable, efficient C, supports almost all of the R5RS Scheme language standard, and includes many enhancements and extensions. CHICKEN runs on Linux, MacOS X, Windows, and many Unix flavours.

FEATURES

• Includes a full-featured interactive interpreter as well as an optimizing batch compiler
• Usable for interpreted scripts or compiled standalone executables with either dynamic or static linkage
• Full support for tail recursion, first-class continuations and hygienic macros
• Highly portable and known to run on many platforms, including x86, x86-64, IA-64, PowerPC, SPARC and UltraSPARC, Alpha, MIPS, ARM and S/390
• Distributed free for use and modification under the terms of the BSD License
• Transparent support for dynamically loadable compiled code and linkage to C
• An easy to use foreign function interface for accessing C and C++ libraries from Scheme code
• Lightweight user-level threads based on first-class continuations
• Provides high- and low-level hygienic macros, including syntax-rules
• Includes a powerful module system that integrates hygienic macros and separate compilation
• Execution profiling, debugging, backtrace and single-stepping support
• A POSIX interface that covers environment and filesystem access, pipes, processes, signals, locks, sockets, and low-level and memory-mapped I/O
• Perl compatible regular expressions, including support for SRE syntax (Structured Regular Expressions)
• Support for interpreted or compiled shell scripts under Unix and Windows
• Support for a large number of Scheme Requests For Implementation (SRFIs)
• Many libraries and extensions are available at "Eggs Unlimited"

DOWNLOAD

Get the tarball for the most recent release (4.0.0) here: chicken-4.0.0.tar.gz

DOCUMENTATION

Browse the User's manual at the CHICKEN wiki

MAILING LIST

The CHICKEN Users mailing list is a medium-volume but fast-response list for discussing all things related to CHICKEN. You can send a message to the list by addressing it to chicken-users@nongnu.org.

If you are interested in the development of CHICKEN, check out CHICKEN Hackers.

DEVELOPMENT

The current CHICKEN development version can be accessed through the Subversion revision control system, like this:

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

(username: anonymous, password: <none>)

The CHICKEN bug tracking system is located here.

CONTACT

If you have any questions, suggestions or insults regarding CHICKEN, don't hesitate to join the chicken-users mailing list. Bug reports should be directed to chicken-janitors@nongnu.org, preferrably using the chicken-bug(1) tool.