Replying to my own mail here, looks like this was a combination of problems. Reading around a bit, looks like readline is ported to v4 but objc is not (although it appears on the v4 page, perhaps I'm mistaken here?) I also had problems installing v3, and it seems like chicken-setup/install has trouble finding libs installed by MacPorts in /opt/local/lib. Is there a global way to configure this when configuring chicken? Either way, I have v3 working now after installing chicken itself (3.4.0) through ports.