Re: Best Lisp/Scheme for Windows development?

"Sean SCC" <sean.mymail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

After a somewhat long journey that started with me thinking Lisp was a
dead language (why?) I have arrived at the conclusion that I want to
adopt Lisp/Scheme as my new development language/religion ;-)

Lisp appears to me to be somewhat unfriendly to someone developing
under Win32. As much as I would like to develop using SBCL it just
doesn't appear to be practical. I would love some help/advice on which
path to take and for that you will need some idea of my requirements.

1. Windows XP OS. (I may move to Linux some time in the next year or so
- still undecided).
2. Preferably free.
3. Potential to run under Linux with very little or no source code
changes. (See 1.)
4. Numerical and general code execution speed is fairly important to
me.
5. Decent GUI and graphics libraries or easy access to them. I will be
developing a charting package and some animations among other things.
6. Decent sockets + networking + web libraries.
7. Straight forward development environment.
8. Not too concerned about debuggers but a nice-to-have.

My own conclusions so far:

As much as I would like to stay in the "pure" Common Lisp environment
the only option I can see that comes close to meeting my requirements
is CLISP and I am almost certain that code performance (point 4. above)
will not be sufficient. From benchmarks I have seen it appears to me
about 5 times slower than the Scheme alternatives. (of course SBCL is
fantastic but not for Win32).

So that leaves me with Scheme. In Scheme there are I think 4
alternatives for me PLT, Bigloo, Gambit and Chicken.

PLT is brilliant for development environment, community, docs,
libraries etc but slooooow.
Gambit is probably a bit too spartan for me but has a lot of potential.
Bigloo and Chicken are very close but...

Chicken wins for me because it is probably only second to PLT in terms
of libraries, community etc. It has apparently about as fast execution
as Bigloo - which is much faster than CLISP and PLT.

So looks like I am a Chicken candidate.

What do people think?

Give the LispWorks Personal Edition (free and downloadable) a shot. I
haven't used it much but it appears that you can write once on any
platform and compile it for any other platform that LispWorks
supports. If you are doing serious development work (at present, I am
not), then it will be worth the price tag for the full edition when
you get ready to ship your product. If you are not doing serious
development work, then it may still be worth the money to you but the
Personal Edition should almost be mandatory for anyone in your
position to at least try out.
.

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