Y_Y_Y·Jan 20, 2023Submission
Schemepunk – A kitchen-sink utility library for several R7RS Scheme dialects
2 points · Open discussionar-nelson
schemepunk
Scheme2020–2023
ar-nelson / schemepunk
schemepunk
A batteries-included extended standard library for seven R7RS Scheme dialects.
2Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
104GitHub stars
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What it is
A batteries-included extended standard library for seven R7RS Scheme dialects.
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-04-26 00:13:45 UTC to 2023-01-20 19:57:42 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesI started a project a few years ago with the goal of making more Schemes practical like this: Schemepunk (https://github.com/ar-nelson/schemepunk)
The idea was to make a standard library as widely compatible with existing Schemes as possible. If it worked, then I could write code (with this library) that was "just Scheme", not a particular implementation, and would run equally well on any Scheme. And it would make bootstrapping new Scheme implementations easy: all you'd need is a bare minimum of R7RS Small functionality, and Schemepunk could do the rest.
I haven't worked on it for a while, since I've moved on to other things. But I still think the idea has a lot of potential.
In Practical SchemeIn theory, R7RS Large will fix the discoverability problem by picking a single blessed SRFI implementation of each kind of library, and giving each one a name like (scheme hash-table), etc. Whenever it's done. And who knows when that will be.
In the meantime, I'm in the process of building my own "alternate prelude" for several R7RS Schemes that chooses the latest SRFI for most of the common features you'd want (strings, hash tables, console text formatting, etc.) and polyfills them for Schemes that don't have them: https://github.com/ar-nelson/schemepunk
Also, the compatibility story in R7RS is better than you'd think. The biggest problem is that a lot of R7RS implementations are incomplete and don't conform to the standard. For the ones that do, it feels similar to JavaScript in the early 2000s: lots of little inconsistencies, but they
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can be polyfilled over with enough work. Someone just needs to give it the Crockford treatment and isolate the "good parts" that can be shared between implementations.
Show HN: Schemepunk – Portable standard library for seven R7RS Scheme dialects
1 points · Open discussionSchemepunk: A batteries-included extended stdlib for seven R7RS Scheme dialects
1 points · Open discussionThis is weirdly relevant. I just finished implementing a persistent B-tree library in Scheme.[1][2]
I don't know why B-trees aren't used more as a purely-functional data structure. Once they get large enough, they don't move around much when changed; there is no rebalancing except on deletes, and even that only affects the direct path to the deleted node.
[1] https://github.com/ar-nelson/schemepunk#b-trees
[2] https://github.com/ar-nelson/schemepunk/blob/master/btree.sl...
In Let’s Invent B(+)-TreesI'm building a language server for R7RS Scheme. I have a basic error-tolerant parser working, and it can infer the location of missing parentheses from indentation. I'm already using it in Vim, and I've been pleasantly surprised at how useful it is, even at this early stage.
I've gotten sidetracked building up the SRFI support in my portable Scheme standard library, Schemepunk: https://github.com/ar-nelson/schemepunk
Right now it runs on 7 Schemes and has implementations or polyfills for 15 SRFI libraries. I'm also working on a B-tree implementation of SRFI 149 (persistent mappings).
In Ask HN: What Are You Working On?