stalin

Somewhat related; Not statically typed nor maintained, but nice work nonetheless [0]. [0] https://github.com/barak/stalin

> Classically, dynamic languages have been interpreted, that is, evaluated at run- time by an interpreter program. In recent years, dynamic languages have also been complied, that is, translated to another language such as native code before being executed. Strange, I thought I have seen compilers for languages like BASIC for a long time. The first LISP compiler is from the early 60s: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-039.pdf Scheme compilers are from the 70s. Rabbit for Scheme: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6913 > We conclude that ahead-of-time compilation is a viable alternative to interpretation of dynamic languages Especially when the AOT compiler can be used incremental and the program can be extended/modified incrementally. See sbcl. > The project then showed that it is possible to compile this dynamic language ahea

The name is taken. https://github.com/barak/stalin

Too late, someone already did that and measured the overhead of up to five interpretations layers: "Scheme benchmarking with a meta-circular" interpreter http://yinwang0.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/scheme-benchmarking... Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20140105145428/https://yinwang0.w... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7045734 (25 points, 443 days ago, 9 comments) (The main critic is that it should compare more scheme implementations.) Many modern schemes (and similar languages like Racket and Clojure) have many optimization, use bytecode and jit compiling, so the abstraction overhead is not as big as in the naive versions. And you get nice code and powerful macros in exchange. IIRC Stalin is faster than C in some benchmarks, but the compiling time is very big. "Stalin: a global optimizing compiler for Scheme" https:

eval is not a good idea if you want to write a compiler that generates small efficient binaries either. This is why, for example the Stalin Scheme compiler does not include eval. "Running that image has equivalent semantics to loading the Scheme source file into a virgin Scheme interpreter and then terminating its execution. The chief limitation is that it is not possible to LOAD or EVAL new expressions or procedure definitions into a running program after compilation. In return for this limitation, Stalin does substantial global compile-time analysis of the source program under this closed-world assumption and produces executable images that are small, stand-alone, and fast." https://github.com/barak/stalin

For an example of a compiler other than GCC that does whole-program optimization see the Stalin Scheme compiler: https://github.com/barak/stalin