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@brainwane you certainly can (and should!) do things like adapt the syntax from one language to compile to another; I'm doing this with https://fennel-lang.org for example that takes lisp syntax in and emits lua syntax out

but there's only so much you can do in a compiler; the data structures of Lua are dramatically different from the data structures of Scheme to take just one example; even a question as basic as "what does nil mean" can have answers ranging from "we don't have any concept of nil" to "it's just another way of writing an empty list" to "it's zero lol"

you can write a bunch of shim code to achieve the Scheme behavior on the Lua runtime, but since that can't be done at compile time there's a large runtime cost to it; I guess it's inaccurate to say that it can't be done, but it can't be done in a way that preserves performance