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lispschemellvm

Why isn't there a good scheme/lisp on llvm?

There is Gambit Scheme, MIT Scheme, PLT Scheme, Chicken Scheme, Bigloo, Larceny, ...; then there are all the lisps.

Yet, there's not (to my knowledge) a single popular scheme/lisp on LLVM, even though LLVM provides lots of nice things like:

  • easier to generate code than x86
  • easy to make C FFI calls ...

So why is it that there isn't a good scheme/lisp on LLVM?

Solution

  • LLVM provides a lot, but it's still only a small part of the runtime a functional language needs. And C FFI calls are uncomplicated because LLVM leaves memory management to be handled by someone else. Interacting the Garbage Collector is what makes FFI calls difficult in languages such as Scheme.

    You might be interested in HLVM, but it's still more than experimental at this point.