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• bigloo

Introduction

This page has the goal of listing the principal differences between Chicken and Bigloo.

Differences

Code optimizations

Bigloo is much more aggressive from a compilation performance standpoint. It shares an implementation lineage with the OCaml compiler.

Static type annotations

Bigloo has a notion of static type annotations, owing to its shared history with OCaml. Chicken does not.

Availability of continuations

Bigloo doesn't have first class continuations by default. There's an optional compiler flag for it, and I don't know what consequences that has for performance or functionality.

Community size

Bigloo's community is noticeably smaller than Chicken's, with fewer resources going into things like organizing wikis, developing extensions, maintaining cross-platform builds, etc. Chicken's eggs are a clear advantage here.

License

Bigloo's license is GPL. Chicken's is BSD.

Backends for code generation

Bigloo has C, Java, and C# backends. Chicken talks to C, and can talk to C++ to some degree. Objective-C support via the objc egg.

SWIG support

Chicken has SWIG support, Bigloo does not. This means that it may be easier to create wrappers around C libraries for Chicken than it is for Bigloo.

Build system

Bigloo's build is based on GNU Autoconf. The Visual Studio build of Bigloo is not in their source pool, and judging by the past 2 years of observation, never will be. It is maintained by Yannis Bres, who does good work, but that work lags the main Bigloo releases. In contrast, Chicken's build is based on CMake. It runs on many platforms with 1 build, including Visual Studio, MinGW / MSYS, Cygwin, Linux, and Mac OSX. The build is in the source pool, is publically available / fixable, and is always up to date with current Chicken releases on all platforms.

Platforms for which binaries are provided

Bigloo provides binaries for Fedora, Debian, and MS Visual Studio platforms. Chicken does not, you have to build from source.

Platforms supported

Bigloo may not provide the binary you want for your platform. For instance, Cygwin and MinGW / MSYS. In that case you'll have to build Bigloo from source. Back in the day, that required a small amount of black magic due to compiler flag quoting or some such. I think the answer was to double the number of slashes specified or something. I don't know if it's a problem anymore, if anyone fixed that wart. There's stuff in their mailing list archives about it in any event.

Main developers

Manuel Serrano, the principal Bigloo author, and Felix Winkelmann, the principal Chicken author, are both easygoing, easy to work with, and responsive to community bug reports + improvement requests or offers.