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. It is mostly conformant to the Revised5 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme with many extensions:

• lexical and syntactic builtin parser generators;
• pattern-matching;
• foreign languages interface (connection to C and to Java);
• modules;
• object-oriented class-based programming;
• preemptive multi-threading;
• unicode characters and strings;
• posix programming (process, pipe, socket);
• openssl;
• multimedia libraries;
• event loops and event-based programming (libuv).

Versions

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

http://www-sop.inria.fr/indes/fp/Bigloo/download.html

Installation

The regular installation from a pre-bundled version is described in INSTALL.md file. This section only covers the installation from a git clone.

To bootstrap the git version, proceed as follows:

./configure && make && make install

As compiling the git version requires a pre-installed Bigloo version, configure will check if such a compiler is available on the host. If not it will download and the first step of the make will compile and install that version locally so that it can proceed to the normal bootstrap.

If for any reason the regular compilation procedure fails, it can be decomposed as follows:

1. Install the stable or unstable version (*). Let us assume that the installation directories are <lib-path-dir> and <bin-path-dir>. The last stable version is available at: ftp://ftp-sop.inria.fr/indes/fp/Bigloo/bigloo-latest.tar.gz The last unstable version is available at: ftp://ftp-sop.inria.fr/indes/fp/Bigloo/bigloo-unstable.tar.gz.
2. configure the git Bigloo version with: ./configure --prefix=<my-prefix>
3. bootstrap the compiler with: LD_LIBRARY_PATH=<lib-path-dir> make hostboot 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

You can also the check the .github/workflows/bigloo.yml script used for the continuous integration. It shows how to compile, run, and test, the current Bigloo version.

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

(*) If you intent to install and older version, instead of installating the last stable version, you must install the stable version that has been released immediately before the version you plan to compile. For instance, if you want to re-compile Bigloo version 4.1b, you must install the 4.1a stable version first. All stable versions are available at: ftp://ftp-sop.inria.fr/indes/fp/Bigloo

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.