Darren New escreveu:
> Being *slower* than "native" C while compiling down to C is easy. Being 
> as fast as C when compiling down to C is tough. Being faster than C is 
> (I'd say) impossible if you actually have C as an intermediate language.

Look up Stalin Scheme.  A heavily agressive optimizing compiler for 
Scheme that quite a few times generates C code that beats hand written C 
code.  If you look at the C source it outputs, you'll be shocked by how 
badly it treats C as truly portable assembly.  Lots of structs and loop 
unrolls.  Worthy of the name.

It is very slow to compile as it's a whole program compiler performing 
many analyses and type inferencing.  It's meant as the very last step in 
the development cycle, after all iterative developing, testing and bug 
fixing was done and is ready to go production.  Think about that, truly 
being able to program in a confortable language without ever thinking on 
how to make the compiler happy and getting top-notch fast code without 
any tweaks...

OTOH, it doesn't support such niceties of Scheme such as a full-numeric 
tower, full-continuations or define-syntax.

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