Peter Bex on CHICKEN Scheme 6.0.0 and the Heap Corruption That Almost Delayed It
Interview with Chicken Scheme Maintainer Sjamaan/Peter Bex
Peter Bex, a CHICKEN Scheme maintainer, discusses the 6.0.0 release, which was held back by a heap corruption bug that only appeared on the CHICKEN wiki server. After ruling out the Subversion client library, the culprit turned out to be read-symbolic-link, broken by a UTF-8 transition change. Bex also shares his path from a Commodore 64 to Scheme, his thoughts on R7RS and the SRFI process, and future plans like unsafe intrinsics and better date/time handling.
A quick glance at the code in the core system confirmed it was totally borked because of a change made for CHICKEN 6’s UTF-8 transition.