Bigloo, a practical Scheme compiler

Bigloo is a Scheme development environment that includes a compiler generating C code and Java classes, and an interpreter. Bigloo is the tool of choice for building autonomous applications in Scheme. Bigloo is mostly conformant to the Revised5 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme with many extensions: Rgc, a lex facility. Match, a pattern-matching compiler. Foreign languages interface (connection to C and to Java). Module language. Extension package system. An Lalr facility. An Object sytem. A thread library. DSSSL support. Unicode characters and strings. Process, Pipe and Socket support. Bigloo comes with an Integrated Development Environment (the Bee).

Versions

The Bigloo git version is intended for contributors and testers. Regular Bigloo users, i.e., programmers will to use Bigloo and compile and run their own applications, should use the stable pre-compiled version available at

ftp://ftp-sop.inria.fr/indes/fp/Bigloo

Installation

To install Bigloo, see the INSTALL file. An ANSI C compiler is required. The original version has been developped with GNU CC version 2.7.2 (Copyright (C) 1988, 1989, 1992 Free Software Foundation, Inc). The Bigloo's boot requires around 300 MegaBytes of disk space. Once it is booted, the Bigloo system can be reduced to about 70 MegaBytes.

To install Bigloo JVM (Java virtual machine byte code) back-end, the JDK 1.8 or an older version is required. The JVM machine must support the -noverify option in order to execute Bigloo produced code. You also need an operational zip utility to be installed. If either the JDK or the zip tool is missing, the Bigloo JVM back-end can't be configured.

The installation process for stable versions is described in the INSTALL.md file. To bootstrap the git version, proceed as follows:

1. Install the latest stable version. Let us assume that the installation directories are <lib-path-dir> and <bin-path-dir>
2. configure the git Bigloo version with: ./configure --prefix=<my-prefix>
3. bootstrap the compiler with: LD_LIBRARY_PATH=<lib-path-dir> make bigboot BGLBUILDBINDIR=<bin-path-dir>
4. install that bootstrapped version: make install-progs
5. compile all the libraries and complete the bootstrap: make fullbootstrap-sans-log
6. install everything: make install-sans-docs

See the doc directory for extra hints and information about the Bigloo installation process.

Overview

The compiler distribution consists of several directories:

• bin contains the compiler executable.
• lib contains the Bigloo's libraries.
• comptime contains the sources of the compiler.
• runtime contains the sources of the runtime system.
• examples contains various Bigloo's examples.
• recette contains compiler and runtime test programs.
• manuals contains the documentation of the Bigloo system.
• doc contains various documents related to the Bigloo installation.
• etc contains various ancillary files
• tools contains severals tools files required for the boot of Bigloo.
• cigloo contains the sources the C headers to Bigloo headers translator.
• jigloo contains the JVM classes to Bigloo headers translator.
• xlib contains an example of connecting Bigloo and the X library.
• contrib contains the list of currently available Bigloo contributions.
• bde contains the source code of the Bee (the Bigloo IDE).
• bmacs contains the emacs-lisp part of the Bee.
• tutorials contains a tutorial that briefly presents the capacities of the Bee.
• bdl contains the Bigloo development library.
• bglpkg contains the Bigloo packages system.
• win32 contains scripts for installing JVM Bigloo based version on win32.
• api contains various Bigloo libraries.
• gc contains the garbage collector source files and ad-hoc makefiles.
• libuv contains the libuv source files and ad-hoc makefiles.
• pcre contains the pcre source files and ad-hoc makefiles.
• www contains the Bigloo web site sources.

Acknowledgments

Many people have helped developping Bigloo, specialy Hans J. Boehm who wrote the garbage collector, Jean-Marie Geffroy who found many bugs and who has written Match, Christan Queinnec for all his valuable comments and help, Dominique Boucher who wrote the Lalr system and some contribs, Jay 'Eraserhead' Felice who added precedence operators to Lalr grammars, Stephen J Bevan, Joris Heirbaut who ported Bigloo under Solaris, Drew Whitehouse who ported Bigloo under Iris Indigo, Luc Moreau, Pascal Petit, Joel Masset and Thierry Saura, Laurent Bloch, Christopher Oliver who pointed me bugs out, Thomas Neumann who ported Bigloo under NeXT, Olaf Burkart for his comments on Bigloo, John Gerard Malecki who point me out bugs and suggested many improvements, David Gurr who points me out bugs, Rodrigo Vanegas who suggested some extensions, Kenneth Dwayne Ray for all its suggestions, Michael Sperber and Vincent Kieffer for the AIX port, Dave Love which fix many bugs, Jacques Garrigue which helped me, Marcel Turcotte, Alexandre Frey, Raj Manandhar which points me bugs or documentation problems, Alain Mellan that provide me with the Format implementation, Dorai Sitaram for his portable implementation of Posix regular expressions. I specially thank Barrie Stott who widely contributes to the documentation improvements, Erick Gallesio for our discussions and for all the code from STk that I have integrated inside Bigloo, Frédéric Boussinot for his help collaboration to the Bigloo thread library, Bernard Serpette who is the author of the JVM back-end, Yannis Bres who has developped the .NET runtime no longer in used today and who has improved the C and Java runtimes, and Sven Hartrumpf a tireless tester and contributor. A special attention to Vladimir Tsichevski and Yann Dirson for there unestimable help.