CLisp application delivery

Here's the simplest way to deliver an Hello World program on Windows. I'm going to use clisp for this, which does not compile to native code, but only bytecode.

The program that prints hello world is simple - 

(defun hello-world ()
 (format t "Hello, World~%"))

(progn
 (hello-world)
 (format t "Enter any key to exit...")
 (read)
 (exit))

Save the code in as hw.lisp and now fire up clisp. At the repl do the following

[1]> (compile-file "hw.lisp")

This will now generate a bytecompiled file - hw.fas. 

Now, save an image of the clisp

[2]> (saveinitmem "hello.exe" :executable t :quiet t
                 :init-function #'(lambda () (load "hw.fas")))

Now, this will generate an executable - hello.exe. 

Copy hello.exe, hw.fas into a new directory that you want to use as the installation target directory. Copy readline5.dll, libintl-8.dll and libiconv-2.dll from \base to this new directory.

Now you can zip this directory or create an installer using InstallJammer or NSIS. 

That's it!

One caveat though. You may need to ship readline as well. That's available in \readline.