I understand that. If you're making software for yourself, for a business, for deployment on a web server, or for fellow hackers, it's not an issue. However, if you want to make end-user software (games, for example), you don't want to require the user to have a CL installed, or have an executable with a 20mb overhead (see XONG and other games written in CL). Is that more reasonable than what I said earlier?

Is 20mb overhead really that bad these days? I'm on a 5 year old computer and currently have more than a gigabyte of free memory.

That's a lot more reasonable, thanks.

I've been trying various approaches to this problem myself but haven't converged on the best cross platform solution yet:

* http://www.aerique.net/software/etotp/ (needs a nice index page)

* http://github.com/aerique/okra (see examples)

The Lispbuilder-SDL people have been working on this as well:

* http://code.google.com/p/lispbuilder/wiki/StandAloneExecutab...

If I could spare the money I'd try out LispWorks (you'd have to pay for each seperate platform IIRC).

I partly agree with the size considerations but only for mobile platforms. What's 20mb for a normal machine?