A new
Scheme implementation, focusing on
I18N, fast startup, and good
Unix integration. The author, one
Shiro Kawai, worked at
Square and apparently wrote their
asset management software, i.e., the tools for querying, storing, & versioning all kinds of data in use by all kinds of production personnel; tools for organizational support; the works. In a write-up on these tools, Shiro says they were primarily written in
Common LISP and
Perl, and he wishes he could use Scheme more often instead of Perl. To fulfill that wish, his Scheme starts up rapidly to better serve as a scripting language, uses
Unicode & other charsets to be useful in I18N contexts (Schemes & LISPs are notably poor at this, at least in current implementations), handy
syntactic sugar (i.e., some nice
read macros), plus lots and lots of
libraries.
I quite like it. I wrote mod_scheme by embedding TinyScheme, but am eyeing Gauche for the next version. It's already become my primary Scheme environment.