Racket branch of Chez Scheme merging with mainline Chez Scheme

I&#x27;ll always have a soft spot for Racket, because of how the IDE literally <i>draws arrows</i> for you, overlaid on top of the code, linking the various occurrences of a (hovered) variable together.[1][2] Seriously, how cool is that? Alas, it&#x27;s unclear how to begin to implement such a feature in a performant way in a DOM-based editor like vscode (I&#x27;m not a web developer, so maybe I&#x27;m wrong about this.)<p>[1] Example gif: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.racket-lang.org&#x2F;define-attributes&#x2F;examplecodearrows.gif" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.racket-lang.org&#x2F;define-attributes&#x2F;examplecodear...</a><p>[2] &gt; Lexical Structure: The lexical structure is shown with arrows overlaid on the program text. When the mouse cursor passes over a variable, DrRacket draws an arrow from the binding location to the variable, or from the binding location to every bound occurrence of the variable.

Very exciting stuff! I submitted a link to the actual MR when this happened; wasn’t discussed much at the time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37932016">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37932016</a><p>(This current submission is really nice; you get to hear more from Matthew about what’s going on.)<p>Chez Scheme (pronounced “shay-scheme”) is the most performant and compliant Scheme implementation out there. [1] For a long time it was closed-source, but was recently open-sourced.<p>It now forms the foundation of the Racket language. (So, I guess that means HN relies on it, provided Arc is using a recent version of Racket.) I asked Matthew why he picked Chez to base Racket off of, and I want to say that he picked it because it implemented continuations really really well and had a good garbage collector too. I could be wrong.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ecraven.github.io&#x2F;r7rs-benchmarks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ecraven.github.io&#x2F;r7rs-benchmarks&#x2F;</a>

It&#x27;s encouraging to see all this solid (if unglamorous) software engineering work happening, for a powerful platform that also has active research going on.<p>(Maybe I&#x27;ll find a way to resume using Scheme&#x2F;Racket. The last few years, I&#x27;ve been using Python, JS, and Rust, partly for employability reasons. They have their merits, but I&#x27;m aware of what I&#x27;m missing.)

One of the things which the racket fork added was resurrecting support for OS X on PowerPC. Very cool to be running the fastest scheme on my old iMac!

Is any software of note built on top of either software? All i can think of are these forums which, while enormously culturally influential, seem unremarkable from a technical perspective.

Does this mean that the Racket and Chez teams will merge as well? I always liked Racket, and use it on spare time once in a blue moon (not enough hours in the day), but I am out of the loop on Chez vs Racket.

Apropos nothing, can we get SICP added to SCP? I’ve always thought it would be a fantastic entry. &quot;Artifact SCP-31415, code name SICP, is a book on an obscure programming language. Students have been observed to die of fright when confronted with it, and those that escape have visible scars from what appear to be tiny blade-like curved objects. Some, however, end up becoming superstar programmers; therefore it’s been an object of fascination for the ages…&quot;

Wasn&#x27;t chez scheme the dialect that let you compile scheme code at runtime as a first class thing? I remember looking into this stuff when I had it in my idea to make a configurable text editor.<p>I know racket is very static in this regard.

I had a look at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;racket-lang.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;racket-lang.org</a>. Where we can download this build? [1]<p>[1] Assuming that the merge has happened since the announcement was on Oct 16

Does this mean I can now use all&#x2F;lots of Racket libs in Chez?

Is it a good idea to use Chez Scheme to go over SICP? Meaning, is it still standard to enter into compatibility mode to do so? Thanks.

Title. Already merged about two weeks ago

Isn&#x27;t the title &quot;upcoming merge to create Chez Scheme v9.9.9&quot;?

TIL that ChezScheme seems to be a Cisco project. Interesting...