Gambit (Scheme implementation)

Gambit, also called Gambit-C, is a programming language, a variant of the language family Lisp, and its variants named Scheme. The Gambit implementation consists of a Scheme interpreter, and a compiler which compiles Scheme into the language C, which makes it cross-platform software. It conforms to the standards R⁴RS, R⁵RS, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and to several Scheme Requests for Implementations (SRFIs).² Gambit was released first in 1988, and Gambit-C (Gambit with a C backend) was released first in 1994. They are free and open-source software released under a GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1, and Apache License 2.0.

By compiling to an intermediate representation, in this case portable C (as do Chicken, Bigloo and Cyclone), programs written in Gambit can be compiled for common popular operating systems such as Linux, macOS, other Unix-like systems, and Windows.

Gerbil scheme is a variant of Scheme implemented on Gambit-C. It supports current R*RS standards and common SRFIs and has a state of the art macro and module system inspired by Racket.³

Termite Scheme is a variant of Scheme implemented on Gambit-C. Termite is intended for distributed computing,⁴ it offers a simple and powerful message passing model of concurrency, inspired by that of Erlang.

While the Gambit compiler produces C code only, it has full integration support for C++ and Objective-C compilers such as GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Thus, software written in Gambit-C can contain C++ or Objective-C code, and can fully integrate with corresponding libraries.