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title: Chickadee 0.10.0 released
date: 2023-05-24 08:00:00
tags: guile, gamedev, chickadee, release
summary: Chickadee 0.10.0 has been released
---

I'm happy to announce that Chickadee 0.10.0 has been released!

Chickadee is a game development toolkit for Guile.  Chickadee aims to
provide all the features that parenthetically inclined game developers
need to make 2D and 3D games in Scheme.

This release is on the smaller side as I just haven’t had much time to
work on Chickadee in the past 6 or so months, but I'm trying to stick
with the routine of publishing a release before each Lisp Game Jam.
The [Spring Lisp Game Jam
2023](https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2023) is starting on
May 26th and if you're interested enough in Chickadee to read this
blog post then you should considering joining in!

The biggest change in this release is not technical: Chickadee has
been relicensed from GPLv3 to Apache 2.0.  This change reflects the
reality that copyleft isn’t a great strategy for something like a game
development library because there are many options to choose from and
all of the best ones use very liberal licenses like the zlib license.
It used to be that there weren’t a lot of game libraries available for
the Lisp family of languages, but that hasn’t been true for awhile.
Most notably, [Trial](https://shirakumo.github.io/trial/) is a Common
Lisp game *engine* that has been used to ship a very real and very
good game called [Kandria](https://shinmera.itch.io/kandria), is far
more featureful than Chickadee, far more battle-tested, and is
available under the zlib license.  Apache 2.0 was chosen despite the
bad name that really ought to be changed because it is a similarly
liberal license but also covers software patent nonsense.  If the GPL
has been a blocker to using Chickadee for you in the past then I hope
this license change fixes it.

Notable improvements and changes:

* Chickadee is now licensed under the Apache 2.0 license rather than
  GPLv3+.
* New window event hooks added to `run-game`.
* Garbage generated in performance critical code has been
  significantly reduced (but not eliminated.)
* Syntax highlighting in manual code snippets.
* New `#:smooth?` argument for `load-font`.

Bug fixes:

* 9-patches now render texture regions properly.
* List of bundled libraries needed by `chickadee bundle` was
  inaccurate in 0.9.0 and has been fixed.
* `#:audio` keyword argument to `make-source` is no longer ignored.
* Loading unsupported types of PNG files no longer throws an exception
  when printing the error message.

source tarball: <https://files.dthompson.us/chickadee/chickadee-0.10.0.tar.gz>

signature: <https://files.dthompson.us/chickadee/chickadee-0.10.0.tar.gz.asc>

See the [Chickadee project page](/projects/chickadee.html) for more
information.

Bug reports, bug fixes, feature requests, and patches are welcomed.

Have fun!