Chicken (Scheme implementation)
| Chicken Scheme | |
|---|---|
 Logo for Chicken Scheme | |
 Chicken 5.0.0 interpreter running on macOS | |
| Paradigms | Multi-paradigm: functional, imperative, meta |
| Family | Lisp |
| Designed by | Felix Winkelmann |
| Developer | The Chicken Team |
| First appeared | 20 July 2000 |
| Stable release | 6.0.0
/ 10 August 2026 |
| Typing discipline | Dynamic, latent, strong |
| Scope | Lexical |
| Implementation language | Scheme, C |
| Platform | IA-32, x86-64, ARM, MIPS, SPARC64, PowerPC |
| OS | Cross-platform: Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, AIX, Haiku, Android, iOS |
| License | BSD |
| Filename extensions | .scm |
| Website | www |
| Influenced by | |
| Lisp, Scheme | |
Chicken (stylized as CHICKEN) is a programming language, specifically a compiler and interpreter which implement a dialect of the programming language Scheme, and which compiles Scheme source code to standard C. It is R7RS compliant and offers many extensions to the standard. Chicken is free and open-source software available under a BSD license. It is implemented mostly in Scheme, with some parts in C for performance or to make embedding into C programs easier.