BDC Scheme is a Scheme language interpretter written in Java that uses some compiler-style optimizations for better performance than straightforward interpretters. Originally started in 1996 as a project to learn Java programming, BDC Scheme was used as an extension language in a commercial product starting in 1997. Previous to open source release in 2002 it was written up as part of an a MIT MEng thesis in 2000 where it was referred to as Script. The thesis covers the history of the implementation and benchmarks the performance relative to a variety of other Scheme implementations, both Java and non-Java based such as Kawa, Silk, Skij, Scheme 48, MIT Scheme. Both Sun and IBM Java virtual machines are used in the comparison.
git clone http://carlstrom.com/bdc-scheme/bdc-scheme.git
The thesis describing the history of the implementation is also available as a PDF. There is also a description in the MIT MEng section of my research page.