Scheme Programming Lessons from Tarot

This page is for documenting things learned from implementing tarot, a basic self hosted scheme compiler that I did.

Table of contents

• sequences - constructing complicated lists efficiently.
• accessors - breaking apart data structures in a simple way.
• stacks and queues - hammer and screwdriver, for programming.
• syntactic extension - making things easy with macros!
• qcode - some low level details about the compiler target and virtual machine.
• eval and macros - how we implement an efficient eval, and how is it used to implement macros.
• pointer tagging and data representation - how is data represented and processed in the runtime.

• information for stack traces and profiling - how we print useful stack traces, and profiling info.

• bootstrappable release - tarot is released! and it is bootstrappable from sources.

Compiler Passes

• desugar
• hoist
• denest
• tmp-alloc
• flatten & assemble

Blogging

• scheme-continuations my opinion about first class continuations.
• scheme-parse some work on parsing s-expressions.
• scheme-10 single_cream interpreter
• closure-conversion.rkt closure conversion distilled.
• serialize.rkt extending the above to support serializable closures