IronScheme Nears Final Release

IronScheme, the R⁶RS implementation of Scheme for DLR, has reached RC1 after one year of being in beta.

IronScheme is the effort of Llewellyn Pritchard, aka Leppie, author of the xacc.ide IDE, a development environment for .NET languages. He initially created IronLisp, but discovering that no one was interested in yet another LISP dialect Leppie decided to implement Scheme and to make it run on top of the DLR. The result was IronScheme. After being an alpha project for 10 months and going through 4 beta releases over the period of one year, IronScheme is closing its official 1.0 release being RC1 at this point.

IronScheme can be invoked through the command prompt, a REPL environment, or by being embedded as a scripting library in .NET applications. It runs on .NET/32 and 64 bit and Mono/32 bit.

IronScheme currently passes 8880 tests from the PLT Scheme test suite with only 4 tests not passing yet. Two features are still lacking and Leppie’s plan is to address those in v. 2.0:

• call/cc only supports escape continuations, trying to re-invoke a continuation will result in an error
• during development of beta 2, I made a CPS version, but is too slow to be useful currently, this will be addressed in IronScheme 2.0

Still needed and are to be addressed before the final release: more testing, more integration with CLR and complete documentation. The project is published under MS-PL License.

Resources: Interview with Leppie, Host IronScheme in Your .NET Applications, The Scheme Language Is to Be Split in Two.