When comparing Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) vs Chicken, the Slant community recommends Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) for most people. In the question“What are the best Lisp dialects?” Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is ranked 5th while Chicken is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is:
Has active contributors, including Google and some quantum computing companies engineers.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Heavily developped
Has active contributors, including Google and some quantum computing companies engineers.
Pro Type inference and type checking
Incorrect type declarations are treated as errors. SBCL can deduce types quite well.
Pro Actively maintained
Bug-fixes, performance improvements, refinements. New ports.
Pro Fast native code compiler
SBCL (and CMUCL)'s compiler, Python, produces optimized native code.
Pro Easy install
Portacle makes it easy to install SBCL, Emacs and SLIME.
Pro Free Open Source Software
Parts of SBCL are licensed under a BSD-Style license. The rest are in the public domain.
Pro Friendly, welcoming community
The Chicken community is very helpful and friendly.
Pro Well documented
Chicken has easy to navigate and understand documentation that's updated frequently.
Pro Easy to embed
Likewise, FFI is very simple compared to most Scheme implementations.
Pro Compiles to native code
Pro chicken-doc
It has a tool named chicken-doc. With its help you can easily add autocomplete and documentation features to your favorite editor.
Pro Permissive BSD License
Cons
Con Confusing error messages
Con Produces large binaries
Con Lacks numeric tower support
The core system currently does not support the full numeric tower. However, there is an extension library available.
Con Lacks proper UTF-8 support
For more detail see http://bugs.call-cc.org/ticket/1374
It's been up there for 9 months, still not fixed.