Bigloo is a Scheme implementation devoted to one goal: enabling Scheme based programming style where C(++) is usually required. Bigloo attempts to make Scheme practical by offering features usually presented by traditional programming languages but not offered by Scheme and functional programming. Bigloo compiles Scheme modules. It delivers small and fast stand alone binary executables. Bigloo enables full connections between Scheme and C programs, between Scheme and Java programs, and between Scheme and C# programs.

Current version is 4.3g, released February 2020

The highlights of this release are (see the ChangeLog for a detailed list of novelties of this release):

• modification of the object system (language design and implementation),
• new APIs (alsa, flac, mpg123, avahi, csv parsing),
• new library functions (UDP support),
• new regular expressions support,
• new garbage collector (Boehm's collection 7.3alpha1).

You may also find simple examples illustrating original Bigloo features here.

The Bigloo C code generator delivers fast binaries executables for the Unix operating system. The Bigloo JVM code generator delivers highly portable JVM class files (or jar files) that can be run on any JVM runtime environment (Sun's JDK, Netscape Applets, etc.). We have measured that in general, Scheme modules when compiled to JVM are in between 2 and 4 times slower than their C counterpart.

You may download the Bigloo source distribution in tar.gz format.

You may download pre-compiled binary versions (ArchLinux, Debian, MacOS X bundle, Win32 installer), old distributions, or get information on systems where Bigloo has been ported to by following this link.

Since version 3.0a Bigloo is provided with a packaging system. This system provides public source code for Bigloo. The packages can be automatically installed using the bglpkg command. They can also be browsed at the ScmPkg web site.

• 22 jan 2012: MingGW installer released (see Section download).
• 1 aug 2011: complete re-implementation of the Interpreter.
• 1 Nov 2010: Android full native support (including multi-threading).
• 27 May 2009: MacOS X bundle released (see Section download).
• 27 May 2009: new Win32 port (see Section download) is available.
• 1 Jun 2007: ScmPkg is released
• 17 Mar 2004: Fedora packages for 2.6c kindly provided by Gerard Milmeister.
• 18 jul 2003: A sucessful installation of Bigloo2.5c on Sharp Zaurus (Openzaurus 3.2) has been reported.
• 15 jul 2003: Win32 installer available.
• 28 Mar 2003: Thanks to Peter Ivanyi, SX, a 3D modeler can be accessed from Bigloo programs.
• 6 feb 2003: Thanks to Sven Hartrumpf, SCOP Scheme Binding version 0.3 is now available http://pi7.fernuni-hagen.de/hartrumpf/scop/.
• 23 Jan 2003: The Bugloo debugger version 0.1d is available at http://www-sop.inria.fr/indes/fp/Bugloo.
• 8 Dec 2002: SXPath that is part of the SXML suite is now available.
• 5 Dec 2002: Read Bigloo in the press in Frozen North Linux online.
• 9 Sep 2002: A successful installation of Bigloo2.5b on Windows XP has been reported.
• 6 Sep 2002: Hygienic macros have now a much better support. Shared libraries use a new naming convention.
• 1 Mar 2002: Fthread library is now included in the standard Bigloo release.
• 1 Feb 2002: Bigloo emacs environment now support XEmacs and GNU-Emacs.
• 3 Dec 2001: Successful compilation on Mac OS X 10.1.
• 3 Dec 2001: Kirill Lisovsky released Mole, a system enabling literate programming in Scheme and Hive, a source code manager.
• 31 oct 2001: Oleg kiselyov reports successful installation on FreeBSD 4.0.
• 25 oct 2001: A Bigloo Curl binding
• 24 oct 2001: New ports (many thanks to Matthew Danish).
• 24 oct 2001: New HTML file for the Bigloo documentation.
• 19 oct 2001: Another example of Bigloo/Java that uses Java threads.
• 15 oct 2001: Another example of Bigloo/Java connection.

Since release 2.0, Bigloo contains an integrated development environment: the Bee. This environment handles Makefile generation, project management, symbolic debugging, source file browsing, profile for tuning, etc.

You may find Documentation for Bigloo and the Bee from this site. You can browse it online or download it.

In addition, extra information and examples may be found on the Bigloo wiki.

The Bigloo mailing list is now hosted by sophia.inria.fr . The new email address is .

Information requests, subcription/unsubscription to the mailing list must be sent to

• To subscribe to the mailing list, simply send a message with the words subscribe bigloo in the Subject: field to the above address. Alternatively you can click the following link: subscribe now
• To unsubscribe to the mailing list, simply send a message with the word unsubscribe bigloo in the Subject: field to sympa@lists-sop.inria.fr. Alternatively you can click the following link: unsubscribe now
• To get some help with the mailing list, simply send a message with the word HELP in the Subject: field to sympa@lists-sop.inria.fr. Alternatively you can click the following link: help now

The messages of the mailing list are archived at: https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/bigloo and http://news.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.scheme.bigloo.

• The Bigloo run-time system and the libraries are distributed under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License
• The compiler and the tools are distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.