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Crunch – a Scheme compiler with a minimal runtime

NOTE: This is another guest post by Felix Winkelmann, the founder and one of the current maintainers of CHICKEN Scheme. Introduction Hi! This post is about a new project of mine, called "CRUNCH", a compiler for a statically typed subset of the programming language Scheme, specifically, the R7RS (small) standard.

But most Schemes need relatively complex runtime systems, have numerous dependencies, or have slow performance, which is simply due to the powerful semantics of the language: dynamic typing, automatic memory management (garbage collection), first class continuations, etc. Even without continuations, dynamic typing, the full numeric tower and general tail call optimization, the powerful metaprogramming facilities of Scheme and the clear and simple syntax make it a useful notation for many uses that require a high level of abstraction. The new CRUNCH picks up this specific way of use, but is a complete reimplementation that targets C99, has a more sophisticated type system, offers some powerful optimizations and has the option to create standalone programs or separately compilable C modules.

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