feeley@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (Marc Feeley) (08/24/90)
Gambit is an optimizing Scheme compiler/system under development at Brandeis university. It was designed with efficiency and portability as primary concerns. The current release has a back end which generates M68020 code that runs on M680x0 based unix machines (SUN3, HP300, BUTTERFLY 1, etc). Some other back ends are underway including a MIPS and `C' back end. Gambit supports the IEEE Scheme standard and the `future' construct. Only exact arithmetic is implemented (bignums and ratnums but no flonums). The system contains an interpreter that offers a minimal debugging environment. When compiled with Gambit, Gabriel's benchmarks take (on the average) 50% and 70% of the run time required by code compiled with MIT-Scheme and Orbit, respectively. You can get a copy of Gambit (release 1.4) via anonymous ftp from the machine acorn.cs.brandeis.edu (address 129.64.3.8). It is in the /dist directory and is compressed (about 400K). Don't forget to set binary mode when you transfer the system. Please give me some feedback on the system if you do try it out. Marc -- feeley@cs.brandeis.edu