Conclusions

The Hotdog Scheme compiler is capable of compiling a nearly complete subset of the Scheme programming language to both the Java Virtual Machine and the .NET Common Language Runtime. The compilation strategy strives for simplicity, generating code that somewhat resembles typical object-oriented programs. There is still room for improvement, but performance on various JVMs and beta versions of the CLR are similar ”somewhere between native-code Scheme compilers and pure Scheme interpreters.

Even if the performance of Hotdog does not reach that of optimized, native-code compilers, there are still valid reasons to continue development of the compiler. First, programmers will have access to a large and growing library of code. Second, programs will be portable to a wide range of operating systems and devices. Third, programmers will have access to tools and development environments for the VMs. Finally, many applications are I/O bound, making the Scheme program less relevant to the overall performance of a program. As both the JVM and the CLR grow in popularity, advanced languages, including Scheme, may find these runtime environments a reasonable platform for their languages, and they may find a large audience willing to try them out.