Jolt: running Clojure on Chez Scheme

I've been working on a new Clojure implementation targeting Chez Scheme, and it's now at a point where I'd like to share it more broadly in hopes that it might be useful to others. This post will explain the rationale behind the project, its current status, and why it may be of interest.Why Chez Scheme?My main goal was to make a drop-in replacement for JVM Clojure which had a fast startup and a light memory footprint. If you look under the hood of Jolt you'll quickly see why Chez Scheme is a great choice for hosting Clojure. Since both languages share the same Lisp roots, the core semantics of Clojure map seamlessly to Scheme, avoiding the impedance mismatch associated with forcing functional paradigms onto something like the JVM. Chez brings a mature JIT compiler to the table that can aggressively optimize the emitted code while maintaining a reasonably small runtime footprint. You also get a highly tuned generational garbage collector that is practically purpose built to handle the…