guile future development

[Orm Finnendahl]

Hi,

comparing guile and cmucl or allegro common lisp shows significant
speed differences. I'd prefer to use scheme, though. I looked through
the archives and found some references to "guile vm" or something. Can
somebody tell me what is planned with the development of guile (like
compiling parts to native, byte code or whatever) and whether there is
a time schedule for that?

Are there any alternatives with other scheme interpreters? Most other
systems seem to be more or less dead or designed for stand-alone
applications, which is not what I need (I need an interpreter which
can use compiled procedures etc. seemlessly).

--
Orm