[Chicken-hackers] Re: [Chicken-users] comparison of Chicken and Bigloo?

[Brandon J. Van Every]

bryan rasmussen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm going to be giving Bigloo a try. Any comparisons of the two out
> there? How about compiling, relative usefulness?

You'd need to Google for recent comparisons / benchmarks.  I don't know 
what's going on in the Great Computer Language Shootout universe 
anymore.  I can tell you some basic differences between Bigloo and Chicken.

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

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

- 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.

- 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.

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

- Bigloo has C, Java, and C# backends.  Chicken talks to C, and can talk 
to C++ to some degree also.  Chicken has SWIG support, Bigloo does not.  
http://www.swig.org/

- 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 http://www.cmake.org  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.

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

- 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.

- 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.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every