Clojure-scheme: Compiling Clojure to Native Code via Scheme [video] (opens in new tab)

Scheme is great, but I think there are several key features that clojure has that scheme doesn't provide by default, including (but not limited to):

- Persistent Hash-Trie based Data Structures

- Beautiful asynchronous constructs

- Multimethods

- Protocols

Obviously I in no way intend to discredit scheme, nor start a lisp flamewar :) /sidenote I love this article comparing a game written in 4 lisp dialects (http://technomancy.us/169)

For one thing, one might get interoperability with clojure libraries (at least those that aren't just wrappers around java libraries). For another thing, clojure has some nice language features and I'm all for supporting multiple lispy dialects on top of various compiler/runtime environments. My personal wish is to have clojure running on SBCL with trivial interoperability between common lisp and clojure code.

If one already knows Clojure, the value is obvious: you don't need to learn a new language.

It's also of course debatable that scheme is "just as nice", so you can imagine there are people who, other things being equal, prefer Clojure.

Clojure has a much stronger polymorphism story than Scheme. This makes sense as Clojure was designed to live in an OO host language. Practically this could mean, say, much cleaner Objective-C interop.

I don’t know much Clojure, but I thought that lack of TCO was not a problem because you can just manually add `recur` (http://clojure.org/special_forms#Special%20Forms--%28recur%2...) when you need it. Are there situations where `recur` doesn’t work but tail-call optimization would help?