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Hello. Will Clinger has done some "independent testing" of the performance of various Scheme systems using the Gambit benchmark suite in the "R6RS" mode (safe code, generic arithmetic, immutable bindings). The results are published on the following page:
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/will/Twobit/benchmarks2006.html
What's particularly interesting is that he benchmarked with more systems than I have access to (including Larceny, MIT-Scheme and Chez Scheme) and on two platforms (Sun Sparc and Intel/Linux).
The "geometric mean" results on the Sparc show that the code generated by Gambit is among the fastest of all the Scheme systems tested (it is only slightly slower than Chez Scheme and basically the same speed as Larceny, which are both native code compilers). Gambit is the fastest of the Scheme to C compilers (about 2 times faster than Bigloo and 4 times faster than Chicken). MzScheme and Scheme48 are about 10 times slower than Gambit. On Linux the situation is similar, and Gambit clearly dominates the other systems, about 50% faster than the next fastest, i.e. Larceny and Bigloo. Note that Chez Scheme was not available on the Linux machine.
So, both on Sparc and Intel, it appears that Gambit is the fastest open-source Scheme system.
Marc