R. Kent Dybvig

R. Kent Dybvig is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Indiana University Bloomington. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1987, with a dissertation entitled Three Implementation Models for Scheme, and his MS in Computer Science from Indiana University Bloomington in 1983, based on his master's thesis C-Scheme. Following his doctoral studies, Dybvig joined the faculty in the Department of Computer Science at Indiana University Bloomington, where he advanced through the ranks to full professor. His career also included a tenure as Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Systems. Dybvig received the Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award for excellence in Computer Science instruction in both 2002 and 2005.

Dybvig's research interests center on programming languages, particularly the implementation and optimization of Scheme. He is the principal developer of Chez Scheme, a mature and efficient R6RS Scheme system renowned for its performance and features such as native code generation and advanced garbage collection. His seminal book, The Scheme Programming Language, first published in the late 1980s and updated through its fourth edition by MIT Press in 2009, serves as both an introduction to Scheme and a comprehensive reference aligned with the Revised^6 Report on Scheme, to which he contributed as an editor. Key publications also include Writing Hygienic Macros in Scheme with Syntax-Case (Indiana University Computer Science Technical Report #356, 1992), A New Approach to Procedures with Variable Arity (Lisp and Symbolic Computation, 1988, with Robert Hieb), and Syntactic Abstraction in Scheme (Lisp and Symbolic Computation, 1993, with Robert Hieb and Carl Bruggeman). Additional works cover topics such as continuations, record types, and compiler frameworks, including the influential nanopass approach to modular compiler construction. Dybvig's contributions have profoundly shaped the Scheme ecosystem and functional programming implementations, influencing tools like Racket through Chez Scheme's adoption as its backend.

Professional Email: dyb@cs.indiana.edu