High-Performance Scripting with Kawa

Scripting languages may be an order of magnitude slower than Java. Kawa is a mature language (from 1996) in the Scheme family. It has eval and REPL, avoids syntatic boilerplate with a flexible and extensible syntax, has no required compilation step, and makes typing optional. Yet benchmark programs run about as fast as Java. This presentation discusses the properties that enable fast execution (including lexical scoping and optional typing) and shows how to write efficient code.
The Kawa compiler performs sophisticated data flow analysis that enables type inference and other optimizations and detects many errors at compile time. In spite of this, compilation is so fast that it is normally unnoticed, which is important for the scripting experience.

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