Yes. Architecturally Arc is like a skin on MzScheme, in the sense that we made MzScheme do as much of the work as we could. Semantically it's not especially like Scheme.
So you should just judge Arc for itself. Its main disadvantages over other Lisp dialects are that it's slow and lacks libraries. Its main advantage is that programs come out shorter.
Not sure if this is the proper thread for you to address this, but I'm curious as to whether you think there would be in value to something like Arc -> C/Java/?
for libraries/frameworks/speed
Arc is intended to not be attached to any other language or VM. That's not to say you couldn't implement your own Arc runtime on top of a language of your choice. In fact, since there are already Schemes that run on top of both C and Java, you could do so simply by porting the Scheme parts to an appropriate Scheme. It's under 1000 lines of Scheme.
