▲Practical Scheme(practical-scheme.net)
35 points by ufko_org 3 hours ago | 5 comments
▲zippyman55 2 hours ago
My funny Scheme story. My work place was using it in production, 1999. A ton of code was written by a VERY SMART (and famous) person and of course it worked. He delivered it under pressure, ahead of schedule and it just worked. Ok, but my frustration was that we could not find anyone to support the decoders. So, I could have 300 resumes, and zero would reference scheme. So, there I was one Sunday, a church greeter, greeting people before church on a Sunday. And a fellow greeter brought up software, and I somewhat went off on Scheme as to how difficult it was to find interview candidates for the system. Then, I turn around to greet the next person, and he had a Fricken Scheme Polo Shirt with a prominent Lambda. I am not sure if he heard me.
▲neilv 1 hour ago
Obviously that was divine intervention.

Atheists in 1999 might have to go Usenet comp.lang.scheme to find Scheme experts.

(Scheme polo shirt at church in 1999? My first guess is around Rice University. Second guess is Indiana.)

▲GuestFAUniverse 2 hours ago
Where's the "practical" one that site really reflected?

I liked scheme as a learning tool and got highest grades. That doesn't change my impression that most of the sites covering it are mental masturbation. Puzzles, or programs for the sake of scheme itself. Where's the stuff to solve real world problems? (OK, mostly solved by other languages anyway... Still: where is the content that really wants a junior to try it out for routine problems and the senior tonstay with it?)

▲noosphr 11 minutes ago
It is hard to find people that can support it in production.

But for building makets of production systems to see where they are likely to fall over I've never found a better language.

The fact that you have to build everything from scratch is a plus when dealing with the eldrich horrors that lurk in business logic - you think you can use a standard queue? Hahaha let me tell you about a 6pm spike in latency that no one could explain and was driving the cellular network of a tier two city towards failure.

▲forgotpwd16 51 minutes ago
What you consider practical enough? The page links to a wiki software, a chat server, and a text preprocessor. Not popular sure but all are useful, practical programs you can use.
▲NuclearPM 11 minutes ago
When did people start saying “a software”.
▲neilv 2 hours ago
I don't know how practical this Web site is: the front page has very old information, and no recent information.
▲valorzard 2 hours ago
What scheme do I used if I want to compile to a standalone executable on both Linux and windows? (That’s not Racket)
▲hedari 1 hour ago
Others have already pointed out several good options. Let me add one more: Gambit Scheme https://gambitscheme.org/
▲valorzard 1 hour ago
I might try this next, will check out and try to build it tomorrow Shame that there’s no way to run ./configure on native windows though, I’ll have to use MSYS2
▲forgotpwd16 2 hours ago
Gauche that is hosted on this site can do it. It does by statically linking the entire Gauche system so may not be the best option. Besides Chez (compiling to native code) that sibling comments mentioned, other options are CHICKEN and Gambit compiling to C (CHICKEN docs provide instructions to even cross-compile[0]).

[0]: http://wiki.call-cc.org/man/5/Cross%20development#cross-deve...

▲ducklord 2 hours ago
https://github.com/cisco/ChezScheme
▲zem 2 hours ago
i am fairly sure chicken can do this (never used it on windows myself but the homepage lists all three major platforms). it worked great for building executables on linux and it had a good ecosystem of packages.
▲valorzard 1 hour ago
I’ve been able to build chicken on Linux kinda, but no dice on windows Edit: oh woops the maintainers responded to me on the mailing list! I should probably respond back https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2025-10/...
▲shawn_w 2 hours ago
Kawa + GraalVM?

I think there's been some work lately to improve Chicken's Windows support.

▲cess11 2 hours ago
Likely Chez, but you provide too little information to be sure what might be a good option.
▲valorzard 1 hour ago
I’ve tried chez exe and I can’t tell if it’s bit rotted or if it just doesn’t work on windows anymore
▲whateveracct 2 hours ago
ctrl+F "chez"

0 results

why? it's so good

▲forgotpwd16 2 hours ago
Page doesn't seem to be all-inclusive in vein of awesome lists (such as github:schemedoc/awesome-scheme) but concentrated to author's own projects (Gauche and apps/libs). And maybe doesn't get updated beyond those (e.g. Bigloo homepage has been moved to https://www-sop.inria.fr/indes/fp/Bigloo/ years ago; probably before Chez became open which may be another reason it didn't made it to the list).
▲cess11 2 hours ago
It's represented where appropriate, e.g. here:

https://practical-scheme.net/wiliki/schemexref.cgi?ChezSchem...