CHICKEN

Since 2000

Chicken (stylized "CHICKEN") is an enduringly popular Scheme implementation. A crowd favorite due to its friendly and practical-minded user community, libraries are plentiful and advice is readily available. The system is well rounded with competitive performance, a good feature set, and fairly complete documentation, making it a good fit for a large variety of problems.

Chicken has a separate compiler and interpreter. The compiler generates C code which can be fed to a number of C compilers, including tcc. Standard practice is to compile libraries (called "eggs") using the compiler, load them into the interpreter for interactive development, then compile the finished program into a self-contained OS-native executable.

Chicken's runtime is the best-known implementation of the Cheney on the MTA design. Continuations and garbage collection are done by leveraging the C language call stack. Chicken has a complete and efficient C FFI. The threading model is green threads. Despite its featurefulness, the sytem is very portable. Chicken is generally among the first implementations ported to fringe operating systems.

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