3 ms·

Still subject to the implementation. Chez Scheme is one of the best for performance vs., say, MIT Scheme.

• etatoby 8y ago
  I'm partial to Chicken Scheme: https://www.call-cc.org/ https://www.call-cc.org/ It's a Scheme-to-C compiler (plus interpreter / repl / script runner.) The Scheme code is transformed into continuation passing style (CPS) and then translated into C function calls that never return, but call other functions instead, forever. Therefore the C stack can only grow, never shrink, and is used as a natural "nursery" or first generation of allocation. When it eventually overflows, the garbage collector is invoked, which scans the stack for "live" values and moves them into the permanent generation (on the heap) and resets the stack; after which, execution resumes. It's the most ingenious way I've ever seen to turn not just Scheme, but any language with automatic allocation into fully standard C code. I think there's only one non-portable function written in assembly, the garbage collector that runs when the C stack overflows. That's a small price to pay to have a compiler that can piggyback on any existing C compiler, for virtually any platform. (It's not even entirely in assembly. IIRC, it uses some kind of setjmp / longjmp sorcery.) Moreover, the generated C code is fully tail-recursive and call/cc comes for free, so you can use first-class continuations in complex ways, without any performance penalty. It has hygienic macros and all the advanced stuff you expect from a modern Scheme. And of course you can link to any C library, use standard C APIs from Scheme and have your code compiled to optimized machine code. If only Scheme was not a dynamically typed language... but that's a rant for a different time.