Editing Scheme (programming language) (section)

== Implementations ==
{{Main category|Scheme (programming language) implementations}}

The elegant, minimalist design has made Scheme a popular target for language designers, hobbyists, and educators, and because of its small size, that of a typical [[Interpreter (computing)|interpreter]], it is also a popular choice for [[embedded system]]s and [[scripting language|scripting]]. This has resulted in scores of implementations,<ref name="scheme_implementations">75 known implementations of Scheme are listed by {{Cite web |date=2009-06-25 |title=scheme-faq-standards |url=http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-faq-standards#implementations |access-date=2009-10-20 |publisher=Community Scheme Wiki}}</ref> most of which differ from each other so much that porting programs from one implementation to another is quite difficult, and the small size of the standard language means that writing a useful program of any great complexity in standard, portable Scheme is almost impossible.<ref name="position_paper"/> The R6RS standard specifies a much broader language, in an attempt to broaden its appeal to programmers.

Almost all implementations provide a traditional Lisp-style [[read–eval–print loop]] for development and debugging. Many also [[Compiler|compile]] Scheme programs to executable binary. Support for embedding Scheme code in programs written in other languages is also common, as the relative simplicity of Scheme implementations makes it a popular choice for adding scripting capabilities to larger systems developed in languages such as [[C (programming language)|C]]. The [[Gambit (Scheme implementation)|Gambit]], [[Chicken (Scheme implementation)|Chicken]], and [[Bigloo]] Scheme interpreters compile Scheme to C, which makes embedding far easier. Further, Bigloo's compiler can be configured to generate [[bytecode]] for the [[Java virtual machine]] (JVM), and has an experimental bytecode generator for [[.NET]].

Some implementations support added features. For example, [[Kawa (Scheme implementation)|Kawa]] and [[JScheme]] provide integration with [[Java (programming language)|Java]] classes, and the Scheme to C compilers often make it easy to use external libraries written in C, up to allowing the embedding of C code in the Scheme source code. Another example is Pvts, which offers a set of visual tools that support Scheme learning.