Javascript to Scheme Compilation

This paper presents Jsigloo, a Bigloo frontend compiling Javascript to Scheme. Javascript and Scheme share many features: both are dynamically typed, they feature closures and allow for functions as first class citizens. Despite their similarities it is not always easy to map Javascript constructs to efficient Scheme code, and in this paper we discuss the non-obvious transformations that needed special attention. Even though optimizations were supposed to be done by Bigloo the chosen Javascript-Scheme mapping made several analyses ineffective and some optimizations are hence implemented in Jsigloo. We illustrate the opportunities Bigloo missed and show how the additional optimizations improve the situation.