Re: [Chicken-hackers] Re: [Chicken-users] comparison of Chicken and Bigloo?

[Mario Domenech Goulart]

Hi Brandon,

There are good chances Bryan won't read your reply because he's not
subscribed to chicken-hackers (at least not with the same address) and
he was not Cc'ed.  Maybe it's better to re-reply to chicken-users.

Moving a thread from one mailing list to another makes the task of
following it very hard, since it's spread in two different places.

Best wishes,
Mario


On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:24:58 -0700 "Brandon J. Van Every" <address@hidden> 
wrote:

> bryan rasmussen wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm going to be giving Bigloo a try. Any comparisons of the two out
> > there? How about compiling, relative usefulness?
> 
> You'd need to Google for recent comparisons / benchmarks.  I don't
> know what's going on in the Great Computer Language Shootout universe
> anymore.  I can tell you some basic differences between Bigloo and
> Chicken.
> 
> - Bigloo is much more aggressive from a compilation performance
> standpoint.  It shares an implementation lineage with the OCaml
> compiler.
> 
> - Bigloo has a notion of static type annotations, owing to its shared
> history with OCaml.  Chicken does not.
> 
> - Bigloo doesn't have first class continuations by default.  There's
> an optional compiler flag for it, and I don't know what consequences
> that has for performance or functionality.
> 
> - Bigloo's community is noticeably smaller than Chicken's, with fewer
> resources going into things like organizing wikis, developing
> extensions, maintaining cross-platform builds, etc.  Chicken's "eggs"
> are a clear advantage here.
> 
> - Bigloo's license is GPL.  Chicken's is BSD.
> 
> - Bigloo has C, Java, and C# backends.  Chicken talks to C, and can
> talk to C++ to some degree also.  Chicken has SWIG support, Bigloo
> does not.  http://www.swig.org/
> 
> - Bigloo's build is based on GNU Autoconf.  The Visual Studio build of
> Bigloo is not in their source pool, and judging by the past 2 years of
> observation, never will be.  It is maintained by Yannis Bres, who does
> good work, but that work lags the main Bigloo releases.  In contrast,
> Chicken's build is based on CMake http://www.cmake.org  It runs on many
> platforms with 1 build, including Visual Studio, MinGW / MSYS, Cygwin,
> Linux, and Mac OSX.  The build is in the source pool, is publically
> available / fixable, and is always up to date with current Chicken
> releases on all platforms.
> 
> - Bigloo provides binaries for Fedora, Debian, and MS Visual Studio
> platforms.  Chicken does not, you have to build from source.
> 
> - Bigloo may not provide the binary you want for your platform.  For
> instance, Cygwin and MinGW / MSYS.  In that case you'll have to build
> Bigloo from source.  Back in the day, that required a small amount of
> black magic due to compiler flag quoting or some such.  I think the
> answer was to double the number of slashes specified or something.  I
> don't know if it's a problem anymore, if anyone fixed that wart.
> There's stuff in their mailing list archives about it in any event.
> 
> - Manuel Serrano, the principal Bigloo author, and Felix Winkelmann,
> the principal Chicken author, are both easygoing, easy to work with,
> and responsive to community bug reports + improvement requests or
> offers.
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Brandon Van Every
> 
> 
> 
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