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Stak Scheme

Limitations in the current implementation

This page describes the limitations on the current implementation of Stak Scheme. These limitations are considered transient although some of them do not have any concrete resolution plans right now; we hopefully remove these limitations in the future versions of Stak Scheme without incurring too much complexity.

Number representation

Section titled “Number representation”

Number representation in Stak Scheme is either a 64-bit floating point number (IEEE 754) or a 63-bit integer.

The other “full” implementations of the R7RS-small standard, such as Chibi Scheme, Gauche, and Guile, often come with the full numeric tower.

The orders of collection operations

Section titled “The orders of collection operations”

Computation times of some operations against collections in Stak Scheme are suboptimal compared to other Scheme implementations. Such collection operations are listed below.

  • vector-ref, vector-set!, and bytevector-u8-ref have computation times of the order O(n) instead of O(1) because their underlying representations are lists.