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> I had no idea that common lisp had image saving!

Lisp has image saving since around 1960...

I probably did at one point know this as I did use it in college but for some reason forgot it (we are talking 15 plus years) given that is apparently how you distribute executable lisp code... IIRC though I hated image saving when it came to Squeak aka Smalltalk so I'm not sure if I did like that.

> given that is apparently how you distribute executable lisp code

LispWorks can:

* save images

* create optimized images/applications for delivery, using a treeshaker for removing unused stuff

* can generate Mac applications with the usual ceremony/ application bundles

* can generate shared libraries which can be linked into programs written in C or similar

Some other compilers can generate standalone C code doing whole-program compilation. For example mocl or some inhouse compilers used by companies.

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