[Chicken-users] for those who keeps score on Chicken applications

[Maxim Grinev]

Hi all,

we would like to report on our positive expirience in using Chicken.

We are R&D team working in the data management area.  We have developed the
following systems:
- BizQuery XML-based data integration system
http://www.modis.ispras.ru/Development/bizquery.htm
- Sedna native XML database system
http://www.modis.ispras.ru/Development/sedna.htm

We were guided by the goal to develop industrial-strengh systems featuring
query optimization, concurrency control, etc. These systems are primarily
implemented in C/C++. But we have found it extremely useful to apply a
functinal language for a number of tasks. One of the main requirement was
tight integration with C/C++ - our primary implementation language. Among
the others we chose the Scheme language and Chicken as its implementation
because it provides advanced facilites for embedding Scheme in C/C++
programs.

Chicken was used for a number of subtasks, namely (1) on-line static query
analysis and optimization (2) off-line tools dealing with metadata
represented in XML (SSAX was used to process XML data in Scheme). It helped
us to save much time and effort comparing this with doing the same in C/C++.

We have found Chicken to be really strong Scheme implementation. There is a
number of points we would like to emphasize:
- Chicken turned out to be very fast for our tasks
- The Scheme/C interface is natural and easy-to-use
- Felix is very responsive and provides really good support for Chicken

As concerns tricky things:
- It was not easy to call Chicken code embedded in C in multi-thread
environment. But this problem vanished into the air after we switched to
multi-process environment =)

Felix, thank you very much for nice job!

Best regards,
Maxim Grinev
R&D team manager
Institute for System Programming RAS
www.modis.ispras.ru