Compiling and Installing Chicken

Install on Arch Linux

Part of these notes is based on this .txt:

http://parenteses.org/mario/misc/installing-chicken.txt

Chicken Scheme provides some commands like csc (Chicken Scheme Compiler) and csi (chicken Scheme Interpreter), and few others. In some distros, including Arch Linux, those program names were later replaced with the .NET Mono stuff:

$ pkgfile --search csc
extra/calc
extra/mono

$ pkgfile --search csi
extra/mono

Which means if we have .NET Mono installed and try to type csi or csc, we’ll be invoking Mono tools rather than Chicken Scheme tools.

If we don’t have .NET Mono packages installed, we can simply install Chicken Scheme from the official Arch Linux repositories:

$ sudo pacman --sync --refresh --needed chicken

But if we have .NET Mono installed (I had once because it was a dependency of some other package), then we can build and install Chicken Scheme manually and add it to the path in a way that takes precedence over Mono csi and csc.

$ mkdir -pv ~/local/build
$ cd !$

$ wget http://code.call-cc.org/releases/5.3.0/chicken-5.3.0.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf chicken-5.3.0.tar.gz
$ cd chicken-5.3.0

$ make PREFIX=$HOME/local/chicken-5.3.0 -j$(nproc)
$ make PREFIX=$HOME/local/chicken-5.3.0 install

$ export PATH="$HOME/local/chicken-5.3.0/bin:$PATH"

Note we add the local chicken bin path first when exporting. That’ll make sure that path is searched for first.

After the make & make install commands above, we should have the necessary tools available in ~/local/chicken-5.3.0 and its subdirectories:

$ tree -C ~/local/chicken-5.3.0/bin
/home/deveng/local/chicken-5.3.0/bin
├── chicken
├── chicken-do
├── chicken-install
├── chicken-profile
├── chicken-status
├── chicken-uninstall
├── csc
├── csi
└── feathers

Then let’s try a few commands to see things are working:

$ which csi
/home/deveng/local/chicken-5.3.0/bin/csi

$ which csc
/home/deveng/local/chicken-5.3.0/bin/csc

$ csc -help | head -n 4
Usage: csc [OPTION ...] [FILENAME ...]

  `csc' is a driver program for the CHICKEN compiler. Files given on the
  command line are translated, compiled or linked as needed.

$ csi
CHICKEN
(c) 2008-2021, The CHICKEN Team
(c) 2000-2007, Felix L. Winkelmann
Version 5.3.0 (rev e31bbee5)
linux-unix-gnu-x86-64 [ 64bit dload ptables ]

Type ,? for help.
; loading /home/deveng/.csirc ...
#;1> (+ 1 2 3 4 5)
15

Congrats! We are all set up and ready to code! 🎉

General Tips

Search for identifiers on this page:

Cheecadee