Who wants a non-toy R5RS Scheme on the Parrot VM?

So do I, go write me one. Here’s how (I hope):

pre-scheme is essentially a lispy-syntax C, complete with memory allocations, freeing, goto, minimal TCO, no GC… basically disgusting from a (this, anyway) lisper’s POV, and a far cry from the shear sexiness of R5.

The interesting thing about it though (other than making C a saner language) is that Scheme48’s VM is implemented via Scheme48’s pre-scheme->C translator, which as it happens, in true Lisp fashion, is itself implemented in Scheme. And I’d imagine implementing the minimalistic pre-scheme to be a far sight easier than implementing all of R5. You can look at the Scheme48 distribution’s makefile to see how to go about getting pre-scheme loaded to play with.

It may be a weird way to go about it, running a stack based VM atop a register based one (let alone one wanting malloc/free), but I’d think it to be the quickest route towards non-toy R5 on Parrot, and if nothing else a sufficient stop-gap until “native” implementations approach practical usability. Plus you already have most of your test suite for free.

Of course I havn’t looked into this in any depth, particularly what the Parrot implementation of pre-scheme would need to do other than parse the syntax. And I don’t really have the time to. So I thought I’d toss the idea out there and see if anyone else picks it up. What the hell, it’s worth a shot right?