scheme Getting started with scheme Installing CHICKEN Scheme

Example

CHICKEN is a Scheme interpreter and compiler with its own extension module system called "eggs". It is capable of compiling Scheme to native code by first compiling Scheme to C.

Installing

Debian or Ubuntu or other derived distros:

sudo apt-get install chicken-bin

Fedora / RHEL / CentOS:

sudo yum install chicken-bin

Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S chicken

Gentoo:

sudo emerge -av dev-scheme/chicken

OS X with Homebrew:

brew install chicken

OpenBSD

doas pkg_add -vi chicken

Microsoft Windows

• Install MSYS2

• Run the MSYS2 MinGW-w64 Shell

• Install some prerequesites by running:

  pacman -S mingw-w64-cross-toolchain base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc winpty wget
  

• Download the latest release tarball by typing:

  wget https://code.call-cc.org/releases/current/chicken.tar.gz
  

• Extract the tarball by running tar xvf chicken.tar.gz

• Enter the extracted directory, for example by typing cd chicken-4.11.0

• Run make PLATFORM=mingw-msys install

If you have trouble running csi, try instead running winpty csi

Using CHICKEN

To use the CHICKEN Scheme REPL, type csi at the command line.

To compile a Scheme program using CHICKEN, run csc program.scm, which will create an executable named program in the current directory.

Installing modules

Chicken Scheme has a lot of modules that can be browsed in the egg index. Eggs are scheme modules that will be downloaded and then compiled by chicken-scheme. In some cases, it might be necessary to install external dependencies using your usual package manager.

You install the chosen eggs with this command:

sudo chicken-install [name of egg]

Making use of the REPL

You may wish to add readline support to your REPL to make line editing in csi behave more like you might expect.

To do this, run sudo chicken-install readline, and then create a file named ~/.csirc with the following contents:

(use readline)
(current-input-port (make-readline-port))
(install-history-file #f "/.csi.history")