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Life & fun · January 26, 2019

IW

I wrote a scheme interpreter in C

I wrote a scheme interpreter in C launched on January 26, 2019 with 7 votes, #1,098 of 2,587 launches that month and more than 50% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 7 years on.

Visit rain-1.github.io ↗Alternatives

What it does

This is a blog post about my new scheme interpreter, single_cream . I built it to support the tarot scheme compiler. tarot is self hosting which creates a dependency loop between it and itself, I like to break this look by bootstrapping it off a much slower and simpler compiler written in a lower level language. I was using tinyscheme for this but for reason, one day, tinyscheme gave GC errors instead of bootstrapping my compiler. I decided to implement my own scheme interpreter because I found tinyscheme’s source code difficult and complex and I found that all the other small c based scheme interpreters were fundamentally lacking (for example, not implementing proper tail calls). In total…from rain-1.github.io

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