Chez Scheme's Superior Compiler Design | Generated by AI
Here’s a clear English explanation of the Chinese post you shared:
The author is sharing an interesting piece of news: Graydon Hoare (the original creator of the Rust programming language) gave a talk this year at the University of British Columbia (UBC) about the history of compilers. In that talk he mentioned the Chez Scheme compiler. Unfortunately the talk wasn’t recorded, but people who are interested can read an article about Graydon’s compiler history reflections here: https://thenewstack.io/rust-creator-graydon-hoare-recounts-the-history-of-compilers
The author then gives his personal opinion:
In his view, Chez Scheme still has the most advanced compiler technology in the world, even today.
He believes that popular modern compiler frameworks like LLVM, although widely adopted in industry, are conceptually and architecturally quite far behind Chez Scheme. He thinks LLVM contains a lot of confused concepts and dogmatic design decisions. In particular, the design of LLVM’s Intermediate Representation (IR) is very hard to surpass the elegance and power of what Chez Scheme achieved.
He also criticizes MLIR (the newer compiler infrastructure used for machine-learning frameworks) as being overly complicated.
Then he quotes Kent Dybvig (the main author of Chez Scheme) with a very famous and influential philosophy:
“I actually just got the data structures right, and everything naturally became fast — not only the generated code runs fast, but the compiler itself is extremely fast too.
A lot of compilers try to do many complex optimizations. Chez Scheme only does the most basic, simplest, and most useful ones.
It’s the programmer’s responsibility to avoid writing extremely inefficient code in the first place; optimizing obviously stupid code shouldn’t be the compiler’s job.”
The poster says: if you truly understand the deep wisdom in this statement, you’ll understand why Chez Scheme is so extraordinarily fast while having an amazingly small code base — it was essentially written by one person (Kent Dybvig, with some contributions from others later).
In short, the post is praising Chez Scheme as a masterpiece of compiler design: simple, elegant, extremely performant, and far ahead of its time, even when compared to today’s huge compiler infrastructures like LLVM and MLIR. The core insight is that “doing less, but doing the fundamentals perfectly” (especially getting the internal data representations right) can beat huge teams doing masses of complicated optimizations.