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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone using ECL in their projects? https://ecl.common-lisp.dev/main.html

What do you love it about it? What do you wish was better or different?

I would like to use it to produce fully static executables for simple utilities written in Common Lisp, but I haven’t successfully gotten it to work yet. Basically, in any case where a 50 MB SBCL binary would be overkill (eg performance is not critical and portability is the top concern).

I’ve also read elsewhere that ECL runs on OpenBSD, where other CLs have traditionally not been fully featured.

Edit: also seems like it could help with compiling to WebAssembly (again, when performance is not critical), although I think their work there is not complete yet.

If you are willing to use somewhat older version of SBCL (2.1.11) then you can use daewok's static executable branch and link against musl. That version only supports gzipped images, but even so you can get it down under 15mb for small programs.

Yes, thanks, I forgot to mention that as an option. I’d like a solution that doesn’t involve patching SBCL, but I’ve been following that project and it’s exciting!

There is also http://ciel-lang.org/#/scripting for scripting in Common Lisp (similar to Janet)

I had not run across this. Thanks!

Looks like this doesn't support musl libc-based distributions? Also, it seems to require an account to download, which seems odd.

Hey! Emscripten port works (it will be merged somewhere soon, and we anticipate a release later this year), the next thing to target is "pure" WASI. Yes, ECL runs fine on OpenBSD (as well as on Windows, Linux, other BSD, haiku, iphone, android and - in a branch - wasm).

That’s awesome news!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com