R6RS | R7RS
Older specifications: R5RS | R4RS
Implementations
- Bones: Another Scheme compiler, targets x86_64
- Gambit Scheme (Source): an efficient implementation of the Scheme programming language.
- Larceny
- MIT/GNU Scheme
- GNU Guile Scheme
- C: Chibi Scheme: Implements R7RS small.
- C: Chicken Scheme: Implements R5RS (with some changes). R7RS support is a work in progress.
- C: s7
- CLR: IronScheme
- JVM: Bigloo
- JVM: Kawa
- JVM: SISC: SISC is an extensible Java based interpreter of the algorithmic language Scheme. SISC uses modern interpretation techniques, and handily outperforms all existing JVM interpreters (often by more than an order of magnitude). (Not updated since 2007 but still available.)
- JVM: JScheme and here
- Scheme in One Day (siod)
- Inlab Scheme
- Femtolisp: a lightweight, robust, scheme-like lisp implementation
- WASM: Schism - Schism is an experimental self-hosting compiler from a subset of R6RS Scheme to WebAssembly. Development so far has focused on features necessary for self-hosting. The compiler itself is written in, and compiles, a very small subset of Scheme.
- WASM: scheme.wasm - An R7RS Scheme implemented in WebAssembly. You can try it out here.
- WASM: Guile Hoot - a Scheme to WebAssembly compiler backend for GNU Guile and a general purpose WASM toolchain.
Reading
Resources
Scheme Reports web site: Where standardization discussions happen.
The Internet Scheme Repository: A good source of links, code, and documentation for scheme.
Schemers.org: A list of Scheme resources including documentation, software, communities, jobs, and events.
MIT's Scheme home page: Not quite as extensive as the Scheme Repository or Schemers.org.
Scheme Requests for Implementation: Contains proposals for a number of Scheme extensions. Many of these tend to exist in one form or the other in a lot of the different Schemes, but can have wildly different interfaces. The SRFI process is essentially aimed at making these non-standard features more standard, without actually being standard (see also: obfuscated). Guile 1.8 implements a large number of SRFIs.
Greg Badros' Scheme Lecture Notes: A set of slides that touch on a variety of subjects related to scheme programing, including samples of similar code written in C and scheme, lambda calculus, and lists.
Tags:
jvm
clr
native
language
functional
lisp
dynamic
object
metaobject
Last modified 14 December 2025