On 29.12.2020 16.38, Marc Feeley wrote:
> Biwascheme and lips are fine projects but I don’t favour using them for the “Try Scheme” link as this might give the wrong impression to newcomers because these systems don’t implement Scheme to a sufficient level of conformance to really show off the special features of Scheme (such as tail calls, first class continuations, full numeric tower, delayed evaluation, and newer features of R7RS).  It is essential that these features be fully supported to give a good experience.

I agree that the default choice should be as full-featured and
standards-conformant as possible. A debugger is also nice.

One important aspect of conformance is macros. How's Gambit's macro
system at the moment - does syntax-rules have tail patterns and hygiene?
I can't get syntax-rules to work in
<http://feeley.github.io/gambit-in-the-browser/>: it says "ill-formed
expression" to all macros. The same macros work fine in the command line
gsi REPL on my computer.

BiwaScheme seems to have only define-macro. Lips seems to have a
syntax-rules implementation, but (define-syntax) and (syntax-rules) do
not work in the REPL at <https://lips.js.org>.

Gambit's gsi.js is 11 MiB. Gzipped it's only 2.3 MiB, which suggests a
lot of it is repetition (null bytes and binary->ascii encoding
overhead). Would it be possible to shrink it by compiling to a .wasm
file instead of JS or otherwise?