Compiling Erlang to Scheme

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 cur rent Scheme compilers to quickly implement an e cient Erlang compiler In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the Etos Er lang 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 nally compiled by gcc One might think that the many stages of this compilation pipeline would lead to an ine cient compiler but in fact on most of our benchmark programs Etos outperforms all currently available implementations of Erlang including the Hipe native code compiler