Gambit-C

I've just discovered a new scheme implementation which may be even better than Bigloo for my needs: Gambit-C. Gambit runs on Mac OS X, and compiles to C, just like Bigloo. However the compilation strategy is a bit different. Bigloo aims for roughly idiomatic C code (and relies on the C compiler for many optimizations), while Gambit really uses C as a portable assembly language (and therefore rarely cares about the C compiler optimizations). It looks like (just from reading results of google searches, etc) they are about equally fast in terms of numerical computation. However, Gambit has (from my point of view) a real advantage: loading dynamic libraries works on OS X! Therefore, I can compile my code, and load it into a running REPL---in Bigloo I had to recompile the REPL, and restart it to take advantage of newly compiled code. If the code changes, Gambit will compile it to XXX.o2, and XXX.o3, etc. Each time it's recompiled, the new object file is loaded, and the new functions replace the old ones---no need to stop the REPL process and restart. It feels much more like Common Lisp, but it will satisfy my advisor's need to have something which he can link into a pre-existing C library---the best of both worlds.