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Comment by nickmain | Hacker News Reader

From the Chicken documentation [1] it appears that it does not include bignums in the core but as a separate package that requires GMP [2] to be installed. Since GMP is LGPL licensed this might cause an issue if you are sensitive to such things.

Gambit includes bignum support without external dependencies.

[1] http://wiki.call-cc.org/man/4/Deviations%20from%20the%20stan...

[2] http://gmplib.org/

(I use Gambit but not Chicken)

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FYI, this hasn't been true for 3 years now: http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2010-03/m...

Thanks for the pointer.

This note in the documentation for that egg looks worrisome [1]: "IMPORTANT: This only works when the code will be run on exactly the same platform as the Scheme compiler ran on. Cross-compilation and compiling to C and compiling that on the target platform is not supported. (You will get an error message when you try to do it anyway)"

Does this mean that cross-compiling for iOS would preclude using this bignum egg ?

[1] http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/numbers#compiled-code

I have no experience with it personally, so that might indeed be the case. If anyone mentions otherwise on IRC (#chicken on freenode) I will update this accordingly.

I remember some horrible compilation issues with this library while I was trying to get some academic code running - they used the rationals in GMP.

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