Re: [Chicken-users] Chicken on OS X

[felix winkelmann]

On 5/2/06, Dinesh Nadarajah <address@hidden> wrote:

> I am new to this list. I have looked into Chicken Scheme some time
> back and would liek to do a very small project in it. The only problem
> is that I use OS X. I installed Chciken using darwin prots and it
> installed version 2.3 but for some reason it did not install the FFI
> portion. Some googling asnd seaching the chicken-mailing list archives
> showed that ffi.h and related stuff is not installed by XCode.

You don't really need libffi to run the basic chicken (and if you install
it from sources), but you will need it for developing cocoa-apps
with the objc bridge.

> As some people on the list have expressed, I have some reservations
> about installing ffi.h that is not part of the XCode tool chain. The
> main reason for this I need to use the cocoa binding for the project.
> I have three questions in this regard:
>
> 1. Is there an easier way to get chicken installed and get cocoa up
> and running for it?

Yes, if you install chicken (and possibly libffi) from sources. As I said
you will need libffi for cocoa interfacing, unless you want to use
ObjC through the chicken foreign function interface.

> 2. Are there any plans to provide a binary installer (like for
> Windows) for OS X so that the chicken scheme compiler and related
> tools are easily installable on OS X?

I can try to wrap up a binary release. Actually a pretty good idea...

> 3. Has anyone on this list developed any apps using the cocoa-objc
> bindings? Should I look at other Scheme/Lisp with cocoa support for
> this? Any recommendations?

I myself haven't used it much due to lack of time. But it definitely
works and is IMHO one of the best OS X interfaces I have seen.
Perhaps others on this list can comment a bit on this?


cheers,
felix