Abstract

The programming languages Erlang and Scheme have many common features, yet the performance of the current implementations of Erlang appears to be below that of good implementations of Scheme. This disparity has prompted us to investigate the translation of Erlang to Scheme. Our intent is to reuse the mature compilation technology of current Scheme compilers to quickly implement an efficient Erlang compiler. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the Etos Erlang to Scheme compiler and compare its performance to other systems. The Scheme code produced by Etos is compiled by the Gambit-C Scheme to C compiler and the resulting C code is finally compiled by gcc. One might think that the many stages of this compilation pipeline would lead to an inefficient compiler but in fact, on most of our benchmark programs, Etos outperforms all currently available implementations of Erlang, including the Hipe native code compiler.

Citations