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Building a dev version of Chicken Scheme to try out Feathers

Feathers is a simple debugger that was recently added to Chicken Scheme and I wanted to give it a try. However all attempts I made to build the chicken-5 branch failed. It didn't help that I find git confusing and annoying to navigate.

So I imported the Chicken Scheme git repo into a fossil repo and then went exploring. The fossil import is a mess (could be just an unavoidable loss in the translation or flaws in the fossil import) but it was browsable and it only took a few minutes to (manually) bisect to a buildable version where the debugger worked.

Here are the steps to build:

  1. Get the latest snapshot tar ball and build it
    export PREFIX=/some/path
wget http://code.call-cc.org/dev-snapshots/2015/08/29/chicken-4.10.1.tar.gz
tar xf chicken-4.10.1.tar.gz
cd chicken-4.10.1
make PLATFORM=linux PREFIX=$PREFIX install
  2. I retrieved the git repo and converted it to fossil. If you are a git aficionado you should get the git repo and check out the node directly. Else you might find the much simpler fossil repo easier to work with
    fossil clone https://www.kiatoa.com/fossils/chicken-core chicken-scheme.fossil
mkdir chicken-scheme;cd chicken-scheme
fossil open ../chicken-scheme.fossil
  3. Move to the node
    fossil up 337f5be
  4. Compile using the bootstrap chicken version created earlier
    LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$PREFIX make PLATFORM=linux CHICKEN=$PREFIX/chicken PREFIX=/path/to/where/you/want/to/install install

Now test Feathers

  1. Read the man page
    man feathers
  2. Compile a test program, don't forget the -d3
    cat test.scm

(define (do-stuff)
  (let loop ((hed 1)
             (tal '(2 3 4))
             (res '()))
     (if (null? tal)
         (reverse (cons hed res))
         (loop (car tal)(cdr tal)(cons hed res)))))

(print "Starting...")
(print (do-stuff))
(print "All done")

csc -d3 test.scm
  3. Run feathers. I found that it didn't actually take the program to run on the command line in spite of what the man page says. Just run:
    feathers &
  4. Load your executable with F1 and start stepping with F6. Cool!!

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