
Reimplementation of Racket to run on top of Chez Scheme - igravious
https://github.com/racket/racket7
======
sctb
Discussion from the announcement:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13656397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13656397)

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igravious
The project has moved on (both in terms of where the repo is hosted and
implementation-wise) so I thought I'd re-submit this. Thanks for pointing to
the previous discussion :)

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hittaruki
Is there any update blog or something? This is one of those projects I am very
exited about, would love to follow the progress.

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sigstoat
this [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/racket-
dev/rkXuHNAmQaA/hjgPZ...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/racket-
dev/rkXuHNAmQaA/hjgPZHErAwAJ) looks like the most recent update from matthew.
i don't think he's the blogging sort, so following along on racket-dev is
likely your best option.

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didibus
Is it logical to code in Racket vs just coding in Chez Scheme? How much does
racket bring to the table on top?

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igravious
Racket is more an ecosystem of languages and includes DrRacket, the Racket
programming environment. There's a ton of documentation: [https://docs.racket-
lang.org/](https://docs.racket-lang.org/)

For instance Racket can take on the personality of R5RS, R6RS, or R7RS (among
others) say.

Edit: Maybe I misunderstood your question?

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didibus
I don't know Racket, nor Chez Scheme, but I've been wanting to learn one or
the other. Now that Racket will just transpile to chez scheme, what's the
advantage?

Is there any reason for me to learn Racket instead of chez scheme?

Like there's good reason for using Elm, TypeScirpt, Clojurescript over
JavaScript directly. Or F# over C#, or Clojure over Java, etc. Is there
similar advantage for Racket over Chez Scheme directly? At first glance it
feels to me like no. Like the overhead of Racket not being the first class
language of the backend might be a worst con then the slight language features
it might have over Chez Scheme (if any). Is that true? That's what I'd like to
know.

Thanks.

~~~
igravious
As far as I'm aware Chez Scheme will become the language engine for the Racket
family of languages replacing the current language engine. I mean, Racket used
to be PLT Scheme, we're not talking a huge leap language-wise here, it's that
the Chez Scheme back-end implementation is of very high quality. Racket has a
lot of front-end stuff going on that Chez Scheme doesn't. I'm totally open to
correction here from those with more familiarity.

I am far from an expert on these matters. If you dig into the repos and docs
that have been linked and read around for a bit you'll have as much knowledge
as me :)

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withjive
Very interesting! Great timing for myself, as I just pulled the Chez github
repo just last night— a whopping 900mb btw!

Chez became a point of interest to me after learning about it's solid
performance _(can even do whole program optimisation and across library
boundaries)_.

I wonder how feasible it would be to build a Chez target for Clojure?

Most recently it has been open sourced under a GNU license by cisco, and is
even on Github.

Looks like good times for Chez and Scheme!

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igravious
Great! The bulkiness must be because of the length of the commit history
rather than a measure of how bloated it is. At least I hope!

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Scarbutt
Curious, Chez and not some other scheme?

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kryptiskt
It's very fast and compiles to machine code. The other schemes that can keep
up compile via C.

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kryptiskt
He, I forgot to mention that I also use Chez as a backend for Idris.
[https://github.com/melted/idris-chez](https://github.com/melted/idris-chez)

~~~
igravious
Very cool, thanks for the heads up.

