Re: chicken scheme

[John J Foerch <jjfoerch@earthlink.net>]

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>
> Good point.  Perhaps CHICKEN should keep references to the GCC toolchain
> that was used to build it, or propagate it.  OTOH, it can in theory use
> whatever GCC that it finds in $PATH, and people using the interpreter
> don’t need GCC, which would be an argument in favor of the status quo.
>
> Thoughts?
>

I don't have enough experience with guix to give definite advice on
this, but chicken does present a couple of unique issues.  I think that
having gcc available is essential to chicken's purpose, as one is not
likely to only use the interpreter.  Installing extensions requires C
compilation, and if one is not installing extensions and not using
chicken's compiler, then one might as well be using any old scheme off
the street ;-)

If the gcc-toolchain were kept in reference (but not in the profile),
that may be enough.  The chicken compiler has options (and/or
environment variables) to use another gcc if desired, so people who want
to use another gcc than the one used to build chicken can still do so.

Some chicken extensions install executable programs (for example
hyde).  On other OSes they would normally be installed to
/usr/local/bin.  Obviously this would be different for guix.

--
John Foerch