* Even the fastest of the schemes is slower than SBCL.
* The interactive development features in Common Lisp are there because they got baked into the spec. They aren’t really a thing with scheme.
* Common Lisp has a specification everyone follows. Scheme has THREE completely different specs everyone fights over. Version 6 is the LEAST common (though probably the best for real work), but it’s also the choice of Chez scheme which is the fastest implementation (last I checked).
* Related are the SRFIs. There’s over 200 of them. The language isn’t useful unless a bunch of these have been baked into the compiler. This is HORRIBLE for users. If you want to do something, you must search the SRFIs, find the correct one, look up if it’s actually supported, then read the spec because implementations don’t actually documents this stuff in their own docs. https://srfi.schemers.org/
This all makes portability a disaster. Imagine trying to make a library that works across three versions of the language (all with different features and ways of doing basic things like importing code). Next, you have to work around which implementations support which basic SRFI (eg, Can I use list operators beyond car/cdr? Can I use basic string operators? Mutable arrays? Hash Tables? Records? Threads? Integer bitwise operators? Streams? The other 200+ SRFIs that cover basic stuff that should have been in the language itself?
The result is everyone constantly recreating the wheel in slightly different ways. R7RS-large was supposed to fix some of the worst of these issues, but we’re 10 years out now and still waiting.
* Even the fastest of the schemes is slower than SBCL.
* The interactive development features in Common Lisp are there because they got baked into the spec. They aren’t really a thing with scheme.
* Common Lisp has a specification everyone follows. Scheme has THREE completely different specs everyone fights over. Version 6 is the LEAST common (though probably the best for real work), but it’s also the choice of Chez scheme which is the fastest implementation (last I checked).
* Related are the SRFIs. There’s over 200 of them. The language isn’t useful unless a bunch of these have been baked into the compiler. This is HORRIBLE for users. If you want to do something, you must search the SRFIs, find the correct one, look up if it’s actually supported, then read the spec because implementations don’t actually documents this stuff in their own docs. https://srfi.schemers.org/
This all makes portability a disaster. Imagine trying to make a library that works across three versions of the language (all with different features and ways of doing basic things like importing code). Next, you have to work around which implementations support which basic SRFI (eg, Can I use list operators beyond car/cdr? Can I use basic string operators? Mutable arrays? Hash Tables? Records? Threads? Integer bitwise operators? Streams? The other 200+ SRFIs that cover basic stuff that should have been in the language itself?
The result is everyone constantly recreating the wheel in slightly different ways. R7RS-large was supposed to fix some of the worst of these issues, but we’re 10 years out now and still waiting.