I used Gambit Scheme to create a full 3d iPhone game called Farmageddon. It is a very powerful Scheme system, with its focus on being very portable and low-level. Because of this, it lacks certain features you might find in other languages, like a module system and a large community.
This article looks a lot like a scheme tutorial to me. That is not to say that it isn't interesting and written well. It's just not what's advertised.<p>Anyhow, for some things Scheme can produce efficient applications. However, other things are extremely inefficient in Scheme. There's no way around the fact that C is still much better at producing small, efficient, native apps.<p>It's much easier to get things going in Scheme. But then when you want to finish off a project to a high standard, the language itself becomes the limiting factor. The lack of optional typing, lack of native 32 and 64 bit integers (for some things you really need all 64 bits), inefficient string handling libraries (especially substrings), lack of standardised object oriented stuff and standardised foreign function interface and a general lack of available <i>efficient</i> and full-functioned libraries all end up causing frustration.
Cool, I wrote that article 18 months ago and I am glad to see it on HN. Chichen Scheme and Racket may have a lot more batteries-included type libraries available but Gambit-C with its custom Emacs support makes for a really nice developer experience. The ability to generate small native apps is great and it is a great tool. Marc Feeley also does a great job supporting it.<p>Since the article is 1 1/2 years old, you should check out the wiki <a href="http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Main_P...</a> because only covered what I needed for my own projects in the article..
On OS X + homebrew[1] to install Gambit-C Scheme you just have to do:<p><pre><code> brew install gambit-scheme
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/" rel="nofollow">http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/</a>