Inspired seeing others quickly built near-production level things that would normally take months or years, I decided to do something that only I would care about: build a Scheme compiler to WASM. I call it Puppy Scheme.
And it happened way faster than I expected. This is a side project so I’m not exactly sure the total number of hours I spent; it was most of last weekend plus an hour or two a couple of weekday nights, but that’s really it.
One night before I went to bed I told Claude to “grind on performance” and when I woke up it had taken compilation time from 3½ minutes down to 11 seconds. Just incredible stuff.
The compiler is definitely still alpha quality but the number of features is impressive for how little time I spent on it. It has:
- Support for 73% of R5RS and R7RS
- Support for WASI 2 and the Component Model
- Uses WASM GC
- Pretty good dead-code elimination, creating small binaries
- Self-hosting – Puppy compiles its own source code to puppyc.wasm
- A wasmtime wrapper to create native binaries
- A website I built that runs on Puppy wasm in Cloudflare Workers. See the code.
I also started working on a little component model that looks a little like this:
(define count 0)
(define (counter-view)
(html (div (@ (class "counter"))
(button (@ (on "click" "on_decrement")) "-")
(span (@ (class "count")) ,(number->string count))
(button (@ (on "click" "on_increment")) "+"))))
(define (handle-event handler)
(cond ((equal? handler "on_decrement")
(if (> count 0)
(set! count (- count 1))))
((equal? handler "on_increment")
(set! count (+ count 1)))))
There’s probably more I built that I have already forgotten about. I run into bugs all the time so it’s probably not ready for anyone other than me to use, but I’ve managed to go pretty deep (if not wide) in just a few days of work. We’ve definitely entered a new world.
This is a side-project so I can’t promise too much and am not sure where I’ll take it from here, but if you’re interesting, puppy-scheme.org is where you can check it out.
