Awesome

Vicare Scheme

Active development of this project is currently on hiatus. The maintainer might accept contributions, but he is not currently working of further development.

Introduction

Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language invented by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman. It was designed to have an exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions.

The "Revised^6 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme" gives a defining description of the programming language Scheme. The report is the work of many people in the course of many years; revision 6 was edited by Michael Sperber, R. Kent Dybvig, Matthew Flatt and Anton Van Straaten.

Ikarus Scheme is an almost R6RS compliant implementation of the Scheme programming language; it is the creation of Abdulaziz Ghuloum, which retired from development in 2010. Vicare Scheme is an R6RS compliant fork of Ikarus Scheme, aiming to become a native compiler for R6 Scheme producing single threaded programs running on Intel x86 32-bit and 64-bit processors. It is tested only on GNU+Linux; it should work on POSIX platforms, but not on Cygwin.

"Vicare" is pronounced the etruscan way.

Vicare offers arbitrary precision integers through GMP. It implements an optionally included foreign-functions interface based on Libffi. The last time the maintainer updated this paragraph, it had tested Libffi version 3.2.1.

A port to R6RS of the SRFI libraries is included in the distribution.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Install

Install Vicare

See the INSTALL file for installation instructions for generic packages using the GNU Autotools. To install Vicare Scheme from a proper release tarball, we must unpack the archive then do:

$ cd vicare-scheme-0.4.0
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

To run the test suite we do:

$ make check

The Makefile is designed to allow parallel builds, so we can do:

$ make -j4 all && make -j4 check

which, on a 4-core CPU, should speed up building and checking significantly.

By default only compiled Scheme libraries are installed; to install also the source libraries we must configure with:

$ ./configure --enable-sources-installation ...

If, instead, we have checked out a revision from the repository, we will have to first build the infrastructure by running a Bourne shell script from the top source directory:

$ cd vicare-scheme
$ sh autogen.sh

notice that autogen.sh will run the programs autoreconf and libtoolize; the latter is selected through the environment variable LIBTOOLIZE, whose value can be customised; for example to run glibtoolize rather than libtoolize we do:

$ LIBTOOLIZE=glibtoolize sh autogen.sh

GNU Libtool is not directly needed by Vicare Scheme, but it is needed to correctly link libraries (like GNU Libiconv) which make use of it.

After this the procedure is the same as the one for building from a proper release tarball, but we must enable maintainer mode when running the configure script:

$ ./configure --enable-maintainer-mode
$ make
$ make install

again to run the test suite we do:

$ make check

To make use of the POSIX semaphore functions, we need to include the pthread library using the option:

$ ./configure --with-pthread [... other options ...]

by default pthread is linked to the executable if found on the host.

A bare build (without support for optional features and external libraries) can be obtained with:

$ ./configure \
     --disable-posix    \
     --disable-glibc    \
     --disable-linux    \
         --without-pthread  \
         --without-libffi   \
         --without-libiconv \
         --without-readline

To test what a rule will do use the "-n" option; example:

$ make install -n

The Makefile supports the DESTDIR environment variable to install the files under a temporary location; example:

$ make install DESTDIR=/tmp/vicare

By default, the Scheme libraries are installed under the directory:

$(libdir)/vicare-scheme

we should arrange the package configuration to install 32-bit binary libraries under:

$(prefix)/lib/vicare-scheme

and 64-bit binary libraries under:

$(prefix)/lib64/vicare-scheme

by configuring, for example, with:

$ ./configure --libdir=/usr/local/lib64 ...

The variable VFLAGS is available to the user when running configure and make to add command line options to the execution of vicare when compiling libraries and running tests; for example:

$ make VFLAGS="-g -O2 --print-loaded-libraries"

Special make rules

There are special makefile rules to rebuild source code files, mostly lexer and parser tables:

ip-address-tables - rebuild the tables for the net libraries
silex-test - rebuild the tests for the SILex lexer
lalr-test - rebuild the tests for the LALR parser

and the following DANGEROUS rule, use only if you know what you are doing:

silex-internals - rebuild the internal tables of SILex itself

Testing

Test files are located in the tests directory; the files with extension .sps are Scheme programs. They are partitioned in two families: the files whose name start with long-test need some time to be executed by a powerless computer; the files whose name start with test can be run in reasonable time on any system. The files whose name contains r6rs are R6RS compliance tests by Matthew Flatt.

The command make check will run all the tests, quick and long; the commands make test and make tests run the same set of "quick" tests; the commands make long-test and make long-tests run the same set of time-consuming tests. The check rule uses the GNU Automake infrastructure (parallel test harness, see Automake's documentation for details). After package installation: we can run the tests using the make installcheck rule which will load the installed libraries.

It is possible to select a single test file by using the file variable on the command line of make; for example:

$ make test file=equal-hash

will run the program test-issue-001-equal-hash.sps. The file variable is used to expand a file name with wildcards as in test-*$(file)*.sps.

It is possible to run vicare from the build directory with user selected command line arguments doing:

$ make test-run VFLAGS='...'

where the contents of the VFLAGS variable are placed directly on the command line.

Some test files need a usable directory pathname in the TMPDIR environment variable.

The test files acting on networking sockets expect localhost to resolve to the IPv4 address 127.0.0.1, which is usually the case.

The file test-vicare-posix-sockets.sps contains tests for network sockets which are normally disabled because the firewall rules on the hosting machine must allow TCP and UDP connections on 127.0.0.1:8080 and 127.0.0.1:8081; to enable these tests run make with the environment variable RUN_INET_TESTS set to something:

$ make test file=vicare-posix-sockets RUN_INET_TESTS=1

Usage

Read the documentation.

Credits

The original Ikarus Scheme code is the work of Abdulaziz Ghuloum. Vicare Scheme is a fork driven by Marco Maggi. See the CONTRIBUTORS file for the list of contributors to Ikarus Scheme and Vicare Scheme.

IrRegex is adapted from the original distribution by Alex Shinn, see the file LICENSE.irregex.

Pregexp is adapted from the original library by Dorai Sitaram, see the file LICENSE.pregexp.

The libraries in the hierarchy (vicare containers strings ---) are derived from the reference implementation of SRFI 13 by Olin Shivers.

The libraries in the hierarchy (vicare containers vectors ---) are derived from the reference implementation of SRFI 13 by Olin Shivers.

The library (vicare containers knuth-morris-pratt) is derived from the reference implementation of SRFI 13 by Olin Shivers.

The library (vicare containers strings rabin-karp) is derived from the implementation at:

<http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/53substring/RabinKarp.java.html>

The library (vicare containers levenshtein) is derived from code by Neil Van Dyke.

The library (vicare language-extensions streams) is derived from code by Philip L. Bewig.

The library (vicare language-extensions loops) is derived from code by Sebastian Egner.

The library (vicare language-extensions comparisons) is derived from code by Sebastian Egner and Jens Axel Soegaard.

The libraries in the hierarchy (vicare crypto randomisations ---) have many authors, please see the headers of the individual files.

Some libraries in the hierarchy (vicare containers bytevectors ---) are derived from the SRFI 13 reference implementation by Olin Shivers.

The library (vicare formations) is derived from: format.scm Common LISP text output formatter for SLIB. Written 1992-1994 by Dirk Lutzebaeck. Authors of the original version (<1.4) were Ken Dickey and Aubrey Jaffer. Assimilated into Guile May 1999. Ported to R6RS Scheme and Vicare by Marco Maggi.

Bugs, vulnerabilities and contributions

Bug and vulnerability reports are appreciated, all the vulnerability reports are public; register them using the Issue Tracker at the project's GitHub site. For contributions and patches please use the Pull Requests feature at the project's GitHub site.

Resources

The latest version of this package can be downloaded from:

https://bitbucket.org/marcomaggi/vicare-scheme/downloads

the home page of the Vicare project is at:

http://marcomaggi.github.io/vicare.html

development takes place at:

http://github.com/marcomaggi/vicare/

and as backup at:

https://bitbucket.org/marcomaggi/vicare-scheme/

The library Libffi can be found at:

http://sourceware.org/libffi/

The GMP library is available at:

http://gmplib.org/

The home page of the R6RS standard is at:

http://www.r6rs.org

Badges and static analysis

Travis CI

Travis CI is a hosted, distributed continuous integration service used to build and test software projects hosted at GitHub. We can find this project's dashboard at:

https://travis-ci.org/marcomaggi/vicare

Usage of this service is configured through the file .travis.yml and additional scripts are under the directory meta/travis-ci.