Operating system | Type Programming language | |
Developer(s) Cadence Research Systems Initial release 1985; 32 years ago (1985) Stable release 9.4 / April 2016 (2016-04) License Apache License Version 2.0 | ||
Chez Scheme is a Scheme implementation by R. Kent Dybvig, first released in 1985, which uses incremental native-code compilation to produce native binaries for the PowerPC, SPARC, IA-32, and x86-64 processor architectures. Chez Scheme supports R6RS since version 7.9.1.
Chez Scheme has a windowing and graphics package called the Scheme Widget Library, and is supported by the portable SLIB library.
In one particular series of benchmarks, Chez Scheme is among the fastest available Scheme implementations on the Sun SPARC processor architecture, while Petite Chez Scheme (see below) was shown as one of the slowest implementations on the more common x86 (Pentium 32 bit) processor architecture.
Chez Scheme has been released as open source on GitHub since version 9.4.
Petite Chez Scheme is its sibling implementation which uses a threaded interpreter design in place of Chez Scheme's incremental native-code compiler. Programs written for Chez Scheme run unchanged in Petite Chez Scheme, as long as they do not depend specifically on the compiler (for example foreign function interface is only available in the compiler). Petite Chez Scheme is freely distributable and may be used without royalty fees, subject to the license agreement.