Pre-Scheme is a statically typed dialect of the Scheme programming language, combining the flexibility of Scheme with the efficiency and low-level machine access of C. The compiler uses type inference, partial evaluation, and other correctness-preserving transformations to compile a subset of Scheme into C with no additional runtime overhead. This makes Pre-Scheme a viable alternative to C for programming virtual machines, operating systems, and embedded systems where the runtime overhead of a complete Scheme implementation is not desirable.