It does pretty well considering the obstacles holding it back, garbage collection and implicit typing are rather hefty lodestones to work around, but Chez has a

It does pretty well considering the obstacles holding it back, garbage collection and implicit typing are rather hefty lodestones to work around, but Chez has a quite sophisticated compiler which can do some impressive optimizations. Of course certain Common Lisp implementations like SBCL still outshine Chez, but for a Scheme implementation it's rather impressive. Of course if you want something really fast you let a genius who knows the target system inside and out write some hand-optimized assembly, but for a program that only needs to run once (or that has no direct or indirect connection to an end user) Chez is roughly fast enough.