Ikarus So… For a good long while I have been tracking the Ikarus Scheme implementation. I like it because it tries to comply with R6RS, compiles to some pretty quick code and recently added 64bit support. I like it so much that I even package it and a number of related libraries for Arch Linux. However, Ikarus has a single annoyance for me - it is not easy to extend it with C libraries....
If you follow scheme or lisp news in even a passing fashion you can’t have failed to notice the arrival of Ikarus Scheme, the nifty incremental, native scheme code compiler. It’s an lovely new version of scheme based around R6RS. That means it supports a nice clean library system (standardised!) and scripting in the manner of Perl, Python and Ruby. Though it lacks the maturity and library base you’d find in chicken or PLT, it’s still a very attractive proposition, and the quality of the product thus far, combined with the nascent community feel around it has certainly got my spider sense tingling....