What is the best Scheme implementation for working through SICP?

I have been using PLT Scheme, but it has some issues. Does anyone know of a better implementation for working through SICP?

Solution 1:

Use Racket (formerly PLT Scheme).

The DrRacket IDE is an excellent starting point for all things Scheme including SICP.

To look up keywords in the documentation, place the cursor on the keyword and press F1. In DrRacket you can now see the images directly in the REPL (the read-eval-print-loop).

SICP Support for DrRacket, by Neil van Dyke.

Update (2016): The new SICP package is at http://pkgs.racket-lang.org/#[sicp] Download it with the Package Manager (in DrRacket) or use raco. Manual

Update2 (2016): Also if you want to try a new implementation of the SICP picture language, then download sicp-pict2.rkt.

Update3 (2020): The sicp-lang package includes an implementation of the sicp language and the sicp picture language.

Documentation: SICP Support for DrRacket
Source Code: sicp-lang on GitHub
Racket Package: sicp-lang package info

Note: The picture language has more features (such as colors and larger sizes) than the picture language described in the book. The source contains examples: https://github.com/sicp-lang/sicp/blob/master/sicp-pict/main.rkt

Solution 2:

Use MIT Scheme.

It's recommended by the authors of SICP, and is used at MIT for the 6.001: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs course.

Solution 3:

MIT/GNU Scheme, just make sure you load the SICP compatibility package (yes, they provide specific libraries to enhance guarantee the SICP exercises work).

Solution 4:

This was suprisingly annoying to get done on macOS. Here's how it works as of today, assuming you have Homebrew. (Might want to run brew update once in a while).

brew cask install racket
raco setup  # might be optional
raco pkg install sicp

Now you can (require sicp) or simply run

racket -l sicp --repl

Which you might want to abbreviate to scheme. In bash that'd be

alias scheme='racket -l sicp --repl'

which you can add to your ~/.bashrc

Solution 5:

I've just started do SICP this week.

Currently, MIT Scheme is broken in in Ubuntu Linux (9.04 "jaunty"). It might be working in the future.

DrScheme is working, and is working well. You can use soegard's package listed above or Neil Van Dyke's package, which is based on soegard's package and is available from http://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-plt/. The nice thing about this package is that when installed, you can use Language|Choose Language.... menu item to select SICP.