What do I need to know to write a scheme compiler?

Hello comp.compilers,


My goal is to write a self hosting compiler for scheme to x86 64
assembly. I will be happy to leave call/cc out of it since I think it
complicates things. What I am focusing on is lambda and tail call
elimination.


I've tried to do it using the CPS transform but this produced code
that was far too slow to self host. I think that it introduces too
many lambdas all of which get heap allocated, I don't know how to do
analysis on the code to find out how which closures can be stack
allocated.


Could anyone give me advice on what I need to learn about implementing
closures in order to make a compiler that's efficient enough to self
host rather than just compiling tiny test programs? Should I stick
with CPS and try to do optimizations based on 0CFA (I have read about
it and it seems powerful but it looks very very difficult).


Thanks!

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