The Larceny Project is a set of computer

Computer

A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

 programming

Computer programming

Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...

 language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

s, specifically Scheme implementations, using the Twobit optimizing Scheme compiler. Larceny is the back-end which compiles to native x86

X86 architecture

The term x86 refers to a family of instruction set architectures based on the Intel 8086 CPU. The 8086 was launched in 1978 as a fully 16-bit extension of Intel's 8-bit based 8080 microprocessor and also introduced segmentation to overcome the 16-bit addressing barrier of such designs...

 or SPARC

SPARC

SPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....

 code, Petit Larceny is a Scheme to C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

 compiler and Common Larceny is a Microsoft .NET compatible implementation running in the Common Language Runtime

Common Language Runtime

The Common Language Runtime is the virtual machine component of Microsoft's .NET framework and is responsible for managing the execution of .NET programs. In a process known as just-in-time compilation, the CLR compiles the intermediate language code known as CIL into the machine instructions...

 and generating Common Intermediate Language

Common Intermediate Language

Common Intermediate Language is the lowest-level human-readable programming language defined by the Common Language Infrastructure specification and is used by the .NET Framework and Mono...

.

• Larceny is a research-quality implementation of Scheme compiler for the SPARC (available since 1999).
• Petit Larceny is a portable implementation of Scheme compiler that compiles to C
  C (programming language)
  C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
  
   instead of SPARC machine code (available since June 2005).
• Common Larceny is an implementation of Scheme compiler that compiles to Microsoft's IL instead of C and runs on Microsoft
  Microsoft
  Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
  
  's CLR (Common Language Runtime) (available since November 2004).

Larceny supports both the R⁵RS Scheme standard and its newly ratified successor, R⁶RS. The Larceny software is open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

and available online.