The Scheme package we use in class (DrScheme) is based on MzScheme, which is a popular and fairly standard version of Scheme. But it’s also very slow. According to these benchmarks, it’s 10 times slower than C on average, and 5 times slower than (Steel Bear) Common Lisp!

Of course, that’s still loads faster than Ruby, but it bothered me that something as similar to Lisp (and requiring the same amount of brain-wrangling for its parentheses) would not similarly share its speed. Well, it turns out that there several variants of scheme compilers that outperform MzScheme. Here are two interesting benchmarks (Twobit, Gambit) that put Chez Scheme (commercial) and Gambit Scheme (open source) on top.

Gambit Scheme claims to be as fast as C in some cases, which is a pretty ambitious claim. I’ll be checking it out soon.