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Optimizing Guile Scheme


s a rather niche language that I love dearly. Guile is a Scheme dialect that features an advanced optimizing bytecode compiler, a JIT compiler, and a modest set of developer tools for inspecting and debugging.

Compiled as-is, it means that multiple dispatch on the operands needs to happen at runtime to determine which specialized “add $type-a and $type-b” routine needs to be called. Unboxed floating point math is what allows Chickadee to do things like render thousands of sprites at 60 frames per second without constant GC-related stutter. Guile will automatically inline procedures it considers small enough for the potential performance improvements to be worth the additional code size.

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Guile Scheme