Why S7 Scheme? (2020)

a month ago

S7 Scheme is a minimal Scheme designed for embedding in music contexts.
It is used in Common Music, Grace, Snd library, and Radium editor.
Features include thread-safety, speed, small size, and a permissive BSD license.
S7 is based on TinyScheme and similar to Guile, with features from Common Lisp.
S74 Scheme is an additional layer of functions on S7 for convenience.
Advantages include Scheme simplicity, keywords, applicative syntax, and CL-style macros.
Disadvantages include sparse documentation and being a hybrid not fully standards-compliant.
Other considered options: Clojure, Guile, Chicken, Gambit, Chez, Racket, ECL.
S7 was chosen for its ease of embedding, FFI, and music-specific features.

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