The Larceny Project -- Home page

Larceny is a simple and efficient implementation of the Scheme programming language. Created originally as a test vehicle for research on garbage collection and compiler optimizations, Larceny has grown into a major multiplatform system, and is currently the only implementation that supports all four de facto standards for Scheme: IEEE/ANSI, R5RS, ERR5RS, and the R6RS. Development of Larceny has been supported by NSF, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft.

Varieties of Larceny

Four different code generators serve as the basis for three different varieties of Larceny:

Larceny compiles directly to native machine code for the SPARC or Intel IA32 architectures.
Petit Larceny is a portable implementation that compiles to C instead of machine code.
Common Larceny runs in the Common Language Runtime (CLR) of Microsoft .NET, generating IL, which is JIT-compiled to native machine code by the CLR.

Downloads

Larceny for the SPARC (Solaris)
Larceny for the Intel IA32 (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X on Intel processors)
Petit Larceny (most 32-bit Unix systems, including Mac OS X on PowerPC processors)

There will be no version 0.96 of Common Larceny, but Common Larceny will be a focus of version 0.97.

Documentation

History

Larceny has been available for the SPARC since 1999. Common Larceny became available in November 2004. Petit Larceny became available in June 2005. ERR5RS and R6RS compatibility were added in November 2007.

The Larceny project started in 1991 at the University of Oregon under the direction of William D Clinger; most of the original implementation was written during 1991 and 1992 by Lars T Hansen. Development of Larceny resumed after Clinger and then Hansen moved to Northeastern University. Hansen began to develop Petit Larceny following the first release of Larceny in 1999; he also wrote the Intel IA32 native code generator. Common Larceny, which is based on Petit Larceny, was developed in 2002-2004 by Ryan Culpepper, Joe Marshall, Dale Vaillancourt, and others under the direction of Clinger and Matthias Felleisen. The more recent versions of these systems were built by Clinger, Felix Klock, Jesse Tov, and Chris Burns.