I wrote a toy Scheme implementation in OCaml by using the Camplp4 preprocessor. In benchmarks, it was faster than Gambit Scheme, which compiles through C.
No. I wrote it about 10 years before GitHub existed, and it’s just a toy. All it does is transform core Scheme syntax to Ocaml syntax, converting untyped values in the usual way to a ‘Value’ sum type.
I originally thought it would be slower than the faster Scheme compilers, like Gambit, because of how naive it was, but I was surprised to find that on benchmarks, including compute-heavy ones like fractals and I/O heavy ones like web serving, it outperformed Gambit. That’s really a reflection on Ocaml though, I didn’t do anything special.
If you asked an LLM to do that today, it could probably produce something better for you pretty quickly.