Many (most?) Schemes are compiled. Chicken Scheme (my favorite) is 'just' an efficient Scheme-to-C compiler, with some optimizations for the "interpreter". Al

Many (most?) Schemes are compiled. Chicken Scheme (my favorite) is 'just' an efficient Scheme-to-C compiler, with some optimizations for the "interpreter". Also, there's Stalin, which is one of the most powerful compilers around, in any language. Wikipedia claims that it usually outperforms hand-coded C (which isn't that hard, since C does arrays with pointers and nothing else), sometimes by a lot. There's also Bigloo (which is French and unknown to me), and Gambit, and a whole bunch of Scheme-to-Java compilers as well. Also, I know Scheme48 and PLT Scheme both have compilers, but I don't know much about them. Chicken is so much more hackable. http://callcc.org http://callcc.org