BDC Scheme

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.

The original 0.0 release of BDC Scheme can be downloaded as a zip file or browsed online. The latest is now available via git with:

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.


Brian D. Carlstrom [email protected]