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cisco
ChezScheme
Scheme2016–2025
cisco / ChezScheme

ChezScheme

Chez Scheme

26Distinct people
34Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
7.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Chez Scheme

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 3:38:16 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year34 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-04-26 15:11:27 UTC to 2025-11-10 17:25:51 UTC.

02462016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 1 submissions, 6 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 3 submissions, 2 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC716
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC532
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC523

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Tip: Clone this repo with git clone --filter=blob:none to avoid eagerly downloading large boot files for older versions. Chez Scheme is both a programming language and an implementation of that language, with supporting tools and documentation. Supported platforms (bytecode interpreter may work for others): Windows: x86, x86_64, AArch64 Mac OS: x86, x86_64, AArch64, PowerPC32 Linux: x86, x86_64, ARMv6, AArch64, RV64G, LoongArch64, PowerPC32 FreeBSD: x86, x86_64, ARMv6, AArch64, PowerPC32 OpenBSD: x86, x86_64, ARMv6, AArch64, PowerPC32 NetBSD: x86, x86_64, ARMv6, AArch64, PowerPC32 Solaris: x86, x86_64 GNU/Hurd: x86, x86_64 Haiku: x86_64 Android: ARMv7, AArch64 iOS: AArch64 WebAssembly via Emscripten (bytecode interpreter only) As a superset of the language described in the Revised6 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (R6RS), Chez Scheme supports all standard features of Scheme, including first-class procedures, proper treatment of tail calls, continuations, user-defined records, libraries, exceptions, and hygienic macro expansion. Chez Scheme also includes extensive support for interfacing with C and other languages, support for multiple threads possibly running on multiple cores, non-blocking I/O, and many other features. The Chez Scheme implementation consists of a compiler, run-time system, and programming environment. Although an interpreter is available, all code is compiled by default. Source code is compiled on-the-fly when loaded from a source file or entered via the shell. A source file can also be precompiled into a stored binary form and automatically recompiled when its dependencies change. Whether compiling on the fly or precompiling, the compiler produces optimized machine code, with some optimization across separately compiled library boundaries. The compiler can also be directed to perform whole-program compilation, which does full cross-library optimization and also reduces a program and the libraries upon which it depends to a single binary. The run-time system interfaces with the operating system and supports, among other things, binary and textual (Unicode) I/O, automatic storage management (dynamic memory allocation and generational garbage collection), library management, and exception handling. By default, the compiler is included in the run-time system, allowing programs to be generated and compiled at run time, and storage for dynamically compiled code, just like any other dynamically allocated storage, is automatically reclaimed by the garbage collector. The programming environment includes a source-level debugger, a mechanism for producing HTML displays of profile counts and program "hot spots" when profiling is enabled during compilation, tools for inspecting memory usage, and an interactive shell interface (the expression editor, or "expeditor" for short) that supports multi-line expression editing. The R6RS core of the Chez Scheme language is described in The Scheme Programming Language, which also includes an introduction to Scheme and a set of example programs. Chez Scheme's additional language, run-time system, and programming environment features are described in the Chez Scheme User's Guide. The latter includes a shared index and a shared summary of forms, with links where appropriate to the former, so it is often the best starting point. Get started with Chez Scheme by Building Chez Scheme. For more information about the implementation and a guide to modifying Chez Scheme, see implementation notes. For more information on Chez Scheme, see the Chez Scheme Project Page.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

2 sources
Yeah to be honest one of the things that made me skeptical of the code compression / productivity claim is looking at the implementations of Chez Scheme and Racket (after also looking at 20+ compilers / interpreters, and working on a language for a few years). I'm pointing to them as very long-lived and valuable codebases written in Lisp dialects. Chez Scheme is a 35 year old codebase and Racket is also decades old. So I'm not saying there's anything wrong with them, but I am saying that it doesn't appear that they're 10x easier to understand or modify than LLVM or CPython (Chez being a compiler and Racket being an interpreter as far as I remember). Or that you can get a 10x better result. Basically for the claim to be true, why can't you write something like Racket in Racket 10x faster? Like 3 years instead of 30 years. And why doesn
Read the rest
't it do way better things than CPython or Ruby? Those claims might be "slightly" true depending on who you are, but they're not devastatingly true. There's been more than enough time to evaluate the claims empirically. In other words they would have already proven themselves in the market if that were the case. You would have extraordinarily productive teams using these languages -- along the lines of what PG hypothesized 15+ years ago. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html In fact the thing I found was interesting is that at the core of Racket is a big pile of C code, just like CPython. A year or 2 ago I watched a talk about them self-hosting more, and moving to Chez scheme's backend, but I don't recall the details now. https://github.com/cisco/ChezScheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chez_Scheme https://github.com/racket/racket/tree/master/racket/src/rack... (FWIW I also looked at and hacked on femtolisp around the same time, since I was impressed by how Julia uses it.) correction: it looks like Racket has a JIT too, written in C. Still same point applies: it's not magic and looks a lot like similar codebases in C. Chez is more self hosted AFAIR but it's also hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
In Grammars for Programming Languages (2018)

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