Features

Standard conformance

• Covers R5RS, almost.
• Both R5RS high-level macro and legacy define-macro are supported.
• Numeric operations are supported on fixnum, bignum, flonum and complex.
• Supports the following SRFIs.
  • SRFI-0 Feature based conditional expansion construct
  • SRFI-1 List library
  • SRFI-2 And-let*
  • SRFI-4 Homogeneous numeric vector datatypes
  • SRFI-5 A compatible let form with signatures and rest arguments
  • SRFI-6 String ports
  • SRFI-7 Feature-based program configuration language
  • SRFI-8 Receive
  • SRFI-9 Record Types
  • SRFI-10 Sharp-comma external form
  • SRFI-11 Let-values
  • SRFI-13 String Library
  • SRFI-14 Character Set Library
  • SRFI-16 Syntax for procedures of variable arity
  • SRFI-17 Generalized set!
  • SRFI-18 Multithreading support
  • SRFI-19 Time data types and procedures
  • SRFI-22 Running Scheme Scripts on Unix
  • SRFI-23 Error reporting mechanism
  • SRFI-25 Multi-dimensional array primitives
  • SRFI-26 Notation for Specializing Parameters without Currying
  • SRFI-27 Sources of random bits
  • SRFI-28 Basic format strings
  • SRFI-29 Localization
  • SRFI-30 Nested Multi-line comments
  • SRFI-31 A special form rec for recursive evaluation
  • SRFI-34 Exception Handling for Programs
  • SRFI-35 Conditions
  • SRFI-36 I/O Conditions (partly)
  • SRFI-37 args-fold: a program argument processor
  • SRFI-38 External Representation for Data With Shared Structure
  • SRFI-39 Parameter objects
  • SRFI-40 A Library of Streams
  • SRFI-42 Eager comprehenshion
  • SRFI-43 Vector Library
  • SRFI-45 Primitives for Expressing Iterative Lazy Algorithms
  • SRFI-55 require-extension
  • SRFI-61 A more general cond clause
  • SRFI-62 S-expression comments
  • SRFI-87 => in case clauses

Additional features

• Module system:a simple module system, API compatible to STklos
• Object system:CLOS-like object system with metaobject protocol. Almost API compatible to STklos . It is also similar to Guile 's object system.
• Multibyte string support: Strings are represented by multibyte string internally. You can use UTF-8, EUC-JP, Shift-JIS or no multibyte encoding by configure-time choice. Conversion between native coding system and external coding system is supported by port objects.
• Multibyte regexp: Regular expression matcher is aware of multibyte string; you can use multibyte characters both in patterns and matched strings.
• Reader extension: literal regexp and char-set, string interpolation: Extended reader recognizes #/.../ as an regular expression, and #[...] as a character set. Handy to write one-liners. (e.g. (rxmatch-substring (rxmatch #/(\d+)/ "abc123def")) ==> "123")
  Also "string interpolation" is supported (e.g. (display #`"1 + 2 = ,(+ 1 2)\n")).
• System interface: Covers most of POSIX.1 and some other features common in Unices. See section 6.19 of the reference manual for details.
• Network interface: Has API for socket-based network interface, including IPv6 if the OS suppots it.
• Multithreading: On some platforms, multithreading is supported on top of pthreads. Scheme-level API conforms SRFI-18.
• DBM interface: Interface to DBM-like libraries (dbm, ndbm and/or gdbm) if the system provides them.
• XML parsing: Oleg Kiselyov's SXML tools are included.
• OpenGL binding: OpenGL binding is provided in a separate package.
• GTK binding: GTK2 binding is provided in a separate package.

Performance

Gauche is a script engine in the sense that it reads and evaluates the source code, but internally it compiles Scheme expressions into an intermediate forma by optimizing compiler then executes it by a virtual machine. So far, the performance is comparable to other Scheme interpreters, I hope.

Platforms

The table below lists the platforms Gauche runs on. If you can compile on the other platforms, let me know.

Gauche version	OS	CPU	CC	Threads	Status
0.8.13	Linux (Fedora 8)	x86	gcc	OK	Passes all tests.
	Linux (Ubuntu 6.10)	x86_64	gcc	OK	Passes all tests.
	FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE	x86	gcc	OK	Passes all tests.
	NetBSD 3.1	x86	gcc	OK	Passes all tests.
	Windows XP (Cygwin-NT 5.1)	x86	gcc	N/A	Passes all tests except some system and process-related functions.
	Windows XP (MinGW)	x86	gcc	N/A	Experimental. Lots of system functions don't work. You need Cygwin or MSYS to build, but you don't need extra library (except MinGW DLL) to run the binary. You can also download a pre-compiled package, including MinGW DLL
0.8.8	Linux (Debian3.0)	Alpha	gcc	OK	Passes all tests.
	Solaris 9	SPARC	gcc	OK	Use gmake to build. Passes all tests.
	Solaris 9	x86	gcc	OK	Use gmake to build. Passes all tests.
0.8.9	HP-UX 11.11	PA RISC	gcc	N/A	Passes all tests except gauche.charconv. It seems to choke when compiled with the system provided iconv. We haven't dug it well, but if it bites you, try alternative iconv library.
0.8.12	MacOS X 10.5	x86	gcc	OK	Passes all tests.
	Linux (Debian3.0)	Power PC	gcc	OK	Passes all tests
0.7.1	Linux (Debian3.0)	SPARC	gcc	OK	Passes all tests.
0.5.2	Irix 6.5	MIPS	gcc, MIPSPro CC	?	Passes all tests
	FreeBSD 2.2.1	x86	gcc	?	Passes all tests (thanks to Abe Hiroshi)
0.5.4	MacOS 7.5.5	68k	sc	N/A	Reported to work with some modification by Yasunari Shimizu. Many system functions don't work. I don't have the porting code.

Bugs

There must be a lot, but I list a few important ones.

• Character classes are correct only in ASCII range, even if you compile Gauche with UTF-8 native encoding. I'm not sure how soon I can fix this.
• R5RS define-syntax macros that generate define-syntax macros don't work.