It looks like the closest Common Lisp equivalent is ECL? http://ecls.sourceforge.net/

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2241015

Differences from Gambit-c that does the same thing?

IIRC Chicken uses a really big stack to avoid to many trampoline functions. This sort of implmentation: http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/CheneyMTA.html

It's been a long time since i've looked at it though.

I haven't used any of them recently but I had the perception that chicken had more libraries available. Gambit's generated C code used to be easier to port on other platforms.

But to address the question directly http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bench.html

Call with curried chicken?

Call with current continuation.

Might be more appropriate for a Haskell -> C compiler.

No, I don't believe Haskell has first class continuations.

Do they really need to be part of the language when they can be encoded so readily, either ad-hoc, or with the Cont monad / ContT monad transformer?

I was playing off the 'currying' mentioned above.

It took me a couple tries to parse the headline. Usually, 'C compiler' means 'a compiler that compiles C (to something else)', whereas here it means 'a compiler that compiles to C (from something else)', in this case Scheme.

Chicken compiles Scheme to efficient C that is then compiled to machine code by your machine's existing C compiler.

Should be "Scheme -> C compiler".