Beta release 9 of Gambit-C 4.0 is now available. This is still beta software so some functionality may be buggy. Nevertheless, the system passes Gambit's standard test suite on Mac OS X, Linux/386, and Microsoft Windows. The main reason for this beta release is to allow people to experiment with the new features of version 4.0 and to give feedback.
The source code tar ball is available at:
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~feeley/gambc40b9.tar.gz
Binary distributions of the system for Mac OS X, Linux/386, and Microsoft Windows are available at:
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~feeley/Gambit-C-macosx.tar.gz http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~feeley/Gambit-C-linux.tar.gz http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~feeley/Gambit-C-win32.zip
For Mac OS X and Linux you should untar the files in /usr/local (thus creating the Gambit-C installation directory /usr/local/Gambit-C). On Microsoft Windows you should unzip the files in C:\ (thus creating the Gambit-C installation directory C:\Gambit-C). The bin subdirectory contains the Gambit interpreter and compiler. The doc subdirectory contains the user manual, gambit-c.pdf.
Attached below is the README file.
Marc Feeley
README file for Gambit-C version 4.0 beta 9 (October 11, 2004) ===========================================
This software is Copyright (C) 1994-2004 by Marc Feeley, all rights reserved.
This directory contains release 4.0 beta 9 of the Gambit-C Scheme programming system. Gambit-C includes a Scheme interpreter and a Scheme compiler which can be used to build standalone executables. Because the compiler generates portable C code it is fairly easy to port to any platform with a decent C compiler.
The Gambit-C system conforms to the R4RS and IEEE Scheme standards. The full numeric tower is implemented, including: infinite precision integers (bignums), rationals, inexact reals (floating point numbers), and complex numbers. Gambit-C supports a number of extensions to the standards including:
- an optimizing compiler - with several powerful transformations (automatic function inlining, partial evaluation, etc) - that generates properly tail-recursive portable C code - a scalable thread system that can handle millions of concurrent threads - an I/O system fully integrated with the thread system that supports - regular files - ttys (terminals and serial ports) - sockets (tcp-client and tcp-server) - directories - processes - pipes - an infix syntax extension (SIX) that allows mixing code in the standard prefix syntax with code in a C-like syntax - the following SRFIs: - SRFI 0 (Feature-based conditional expansion construct) - SRFI 4 (Homogeneous numeric vector datatypes) - SRFI 6 (Basic String Ports) - SRFI 8 (RECEIVE: Binding to multiple values) - SRFI 9 (Defining Record Types) - SRFI 18 (Multithreading support) - SRFI 21 (Real-time multithreading support) - SRFI 22 (Running Scheme Scripts on Unix) - SRFI 23 (Error reporting mechanism) - SRFI 27 (Sources of Random Bits) - SRFI 39 (Parameter objects) - a REPL/debugger with - a continuation inspection facility (i.e. "backtrace") - a single-stepping mode - error messages with location of error (file, line, and column number) - emacs compatible line-editing with history - very efficient bignum implementation - a foreign function interface for C - a memory management system that grows and shrinks the heap based on the program's needs - a linker that builds standalone executables and shared libraries - dynamic loading of compiled modules and libraries (supported on many platforms) - Unicode support for characters, strings, I/O and source code - object finalization - pretty printing - keyword objects - optional and keyword parameters (with the syntax and semantics of DSSSL) - configurable reader with control over case sensitivity - write/read invariance of symbols, e.g. (string->symbol "B;123") => |B;123| - write/read invariance of floating point numbers - unhygienic macros - and many other things!
The user manual for the Gambit-C system is available in PDF format (the file "doc/gambit-c.pdf"), in HTML format (the file "doc/gambit-c.html"), in text format (the file "doc/gambit-c.txt") and in "info" format (the files "doc/gambit-c.info*").
Installation instructions are given in the file "INSTALL.txt".
If you have any questions concerning Gambit-C please address them to:
gambit@iro.umontreal.ca
The latest official release of the system can be obtained from the Gambit web page at: