Introduction
Qscheme
News
Introduction
Whatis
Why
Features
Missing
Future
Download
Documentation
FAQ
| What's QScheme |
QScheme is a small and fast Scheme interpreter. It's mostly R5RS conformant.
| Why another Scheme |
I started to write QScheme because I wanted to use Scheme as extension language for a Midi Sequencer project. The sequencer itself was written in C and I planned to use Scheme to build the whole GUI.
I first started to code a prototype with SIOD and Tk. It was too slow. Impossible to display all notes of a simple song without waiting something like 20 seconds. To make it run, I should have to code most of the GUI in C and that was precisely what I wanted to avoid.
| QScheme features |
QScheme has following features:
- Speed: between 2 and 70 times faster than other Scheme interpreters. QScheme also beats some Scheme compiler. QScheme is faster than Perl, Pike, Tcl/Tk and Python. It's more or less as fast as Java.
- Size: the interpreter size is something like 160k
- Easy to interface with dynamic libraries. Most of the external functions and variable can be declared directly in Scheme, without any glue or interface code. (No special C coding).
- Efficient error and exception handling with catch/throw.
- Easy to extend. New type of Scheme objects may be added with minimal efforts.
- Support for unix scripting.
- Includes modular programming support.
- Support Perl like regex. For example one can write:
(if (match #/^(\d+)/ line) (print (regex::$0))
- More or less complete Gtk+ / GNOME / libglade bindings.
- Process forking and piping.
- Online documentation for builtin variables and functions.
- Experimental prototype base object orientation.
- New Native multithreading support (uses Posix threads).
- New Socket interface. It's now easy to build a simple client / server on TCP/IP.
| Missing stuffs (sorry, but it's not perfect) |
QScheme is unfortunately missing some features, mainly:
- The call/cc is only partially implemented.
- Not the full number stack. Only integer, bignum and float are implemented.
| Future of QScheme |
First:
- Write a real application and enriched QScheme with everything that is currently missing.
After that:
- Implement the full numeric tower.
- Try to achieve full compatibility with R5RS
- Change compiler to directly generate compilable C source. Preliminary test shows that this type of code should run more or less 4 times faster than interpreted code.