It is my pleasure to announce the availability of the initial
release of Ikarus (version 0.0.1).

Ikarus is a free optimizing incremental native-code compiler for
R6RS Scheme.

Ikarus is free to download, to distribute, to modify, and to
redistribute. The complete source is available according to the
GNU General Public License (GPL3).

Ikarus is an optimizing compiler, so your Scheme code will run
fast without the need to port hot spots to C "for performance".
With an incremental compiler, you don't need a separate
compilation step to make your program run fast. The best part is
that the compiler itself is fast, capable of compiling thousands
of lines of code per second.

Finally, Ikarus is an R6RS compiler. R6RS is the latest revision
of the Scheme standard. The preliminary release of Ikarus
supports over 80% of the most important features of R6RS, and
later releases will bring Ikarus closer to full R6RS conformance.
R6RS libraries, scripts, record types, condition system,
exception handling, unicode strings, bytevectors, hashtable, and
enumerations are among the supported features.

The main purpose behind releasing Ikarus early is to give Scheme
programmers the opportunity to experiment with the various new
features that were introduced in R6RS. It is my hope that this
release will encourage the Scheme community to write and to
share their most useful R6RS libraries.

For more information, and to download the current release of
Ikarus and the Ikarus Scheme User's Guide, please visit:
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~aghuloum/ikarus/index.html

No software is perfect and this is especially true for the first
releases.  To report problems, bugs, and inconsistencies, or to
ask general questions about Ikarus, please email me directly or
visit the Ikarus page on Launchpad: http://launchpad.net/ikarus/

Thank you very much.