The way that common lisp does this though is pretty much creating a core dump that you can execute, which isn't what most people are expecting from an executable. It's not a _bad_ way, it's just pretty unique to common lisp.
./mycoolprog
The binary itself isn’t structured like a typical one with C debugging symbols, etc. But it’s also not some “faux binary” like a bunch of .pyc bundled as data and unzipped when the program runs. It truly is machine code, just arranged differently than a bunch of C ABI functions.
I claim most people running binaries don’t care about the memory layout of the binary. I certainly am never thinking about that every time I run `grep`. You don’t debug Lisp programs with C’s tooling. You use Lisp’s tooling.
(Unless, of course, you use an implementation like Embeddable Common Lisp, which does compile your Lisp program as a C program, and does produce a non-image-based executable. That’s the beauty of Lisp being a standardized language with multiple conforming implementations.)
http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/DV/html/delivery... https://franz.com/support/documentation/current/doc/dll.htm
Unfortunately none of the FOSS implementations have this ability (to my knowledge). There is nothing inherently in Common Lisp that mandates the "core dump" delivery model.
https://github.com/sharplispers/cormanlisp/blob/master/docum...