2 Overview of Bigloo

Bigloo is an implementation of an extended version of the Scheme programming language. Without its extensions Bigloo does not entirely conform to Scheme as defined in the Revised(5) Report on on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (henceforth R5RS) (see (r5rs.info)Top). The two reasons are:

• Bigloo produces C files. C code uses the C stack, so some programs can’t be properly tail recursive. Nevertheless all simple tail recursions are compiled without stack consumption.
• Alternatively, Bigloo may produce JVM (Java Virtual Machine byte code) class files. These classes may use regular Java classes.
• Bigloo is a module compiler. It compiles modules into ‘.o’, ‘.class’, or ‘.obj’ files that must be linked together to produce stand alone executable programs, JVM jar files, or .NET programs.

However, we designed Bigloo to be as close as possible to the R5RS. Hence, when Bigloo includes a feature that is extracted from Scheme and implemented as normal, this feature is only mentioned in this document and not fully described.

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