<per@bothner.com>Abstract
Kawa started as a Scheme implementation written in Java, based on compiling Scheme forms to Java byte-codes. It has developed into a powerful Scheme dialect whose strengths include speed and easy access to Java classes. It is Free Software that some companies depend on.
The Kawa compiler and run-time environment have been generalized to implement other languages besides Scheme, both in the Lisp family (Emacs Lisp, Common Lisp, and BRL), and outside it (XQuery, Nice). This paper focus on the differences and challenges of implementing Common Lisp (not usable yet) and Emacs Lisp, which supports the JEmacs editor.