Creating Stand-Alone EXE's With CLISP
Friday, December 30, 2005
A recurring topic on c.l.l. is "creating stand-alone .exe files" (see
here and
here for some examples). Sometimes, the query is genuine, but
often it is a troll. The usual "polite" reply is to point the poster to the
commercial CL implementations (ACL, LispWorks and Corman all allow you to
create stand-alone .exe's on Win32) or to explain alternative
packaging options. This rarely satisfies the poster though as there is the common complaint that there
is no open source CL way to do this on Win32 and there are open source
ways to do it with <insert-random-programming-language-here>. However, recently Frank Buß
came up with an experimental technique to create stand-alone .exe
files using
CLISP. He has
documented the technique but cautions "don't use it for
production code, because currently it is experimental". Still, it will
be nice to be able to point people to this in order to get rid of one
of the favorite "troll" topics on c.l.l. And, for those individuals
who do have a genuine need to distribute stand-alone open source executable's on
Win32, this technique (when perfected) will provide them with a
solution.
Update-2006-01-01:Bruce O'Neel mentioned that
ECL can also be used to create Win32 EXE's and it is an open
source CL implementation.
