Minimal Scheme Implementation for use as an Extension Language

Download: version 0.3

Chibi-Scheme is a very small but mostly complete R5RS Scheme implementation using a reasonably fast custom VM. Chibi-Scheme tries as much as possible not to trade its small size by cutting corners, and provides full continuations, both low and high-level hygienic macros based on syntactic-closures, string ports and exceptions. Chibi-Scheme is written in highly portable C and supports multiple VM instances running simultaneously.

Chibi-Scheme is known to work on 32 and 64-bit Linux and OS X, and Plan9, and has been embedded in an iPhone app.

The project home is at [http://code.google.com/p/chibi-scheme/] and mailing list at [http://groups.google.com/group/chibi-scheme].

INSTALLING

To build, just run "make". This will provide a shared library "libchibi-scheme", as well as a sample "chibi-scheme" command-line repl. The "chibi-scheme-static" make target builds an equivalent static executable.

You can edit the file chibi/features.h for a number of settings, mostly disabling features to make the executable smaller. You can specify standard options directly as arguments to make, for example

to optimize for size, or

to compile against a library installed in /usr/local.

By default Chibi uses a custom, precise, non-moving GC. You can link against the Boehm conservative GC by editing the features.h file, or directly from make with:

Additional information can be found in the README included in the distribution.