The Larceny Project -- Overview

• Small and reasonably portable; the libraries are written almost entirely in Scheme and machine-specific parts of the run-time are mostly isolated to a few modules written in C and assembly language.
• Support for pluggable garbage collectors; currently there are four:
  • a traditional stop-and-copy collector.
  • a traditional copying generational collector.
  • a prototype non-predictive copying generational collector.
  • the Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative collector.
• Supports the Twobit optimizing Scheme compiler.
• Good overall performance running code compiled by Twobit (roughly comparable to Chez Scheme, SML of New Jersey, and commercial Common Lisp systems).

Central aspects of the SPARC version of Larceny are described on separate pages:

• Run-time system overview.
• Data types and their representations.
• Garbage collection, memory management, and the write barrier.
• Generic arithmetic implementation.
• Errors and exception handling.
• The SPARC assembler.
• Status and availability.

References:

• Lars Thomas Hansen, The Impact of Programming Style on the Performance of Scheme Programs. M.S. thesis, University of Oregon Department of Computer and Information Science, August 1992.
• William D Clinger and Lars Thomas Hansen, Lambda, the ultimate label; or, a simple optimizing compiler for Scheme. Proceedings of the 1994 ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming.
• William D Clinger and Lars T Hansen, Generational Garbage Collection and the Radioactive Decay Model. Proceedings of the 1997 ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation.