A quarter century ago I devised similar machinery for Allegro.  It's still in the implementation, and I use it daily for personal scripting tasks:

http://franz.com/support/documentation/current/doc/startup.htm#starting-unix-script-3

Your work is a very useful thing to have, but let me suggest there are additonal issues to consider.

The Allegro machinery allows a compiled file to be included as the application.  This eliminates the time necessary to cl:read the source and compile the definition on systems that automatically compile.  For many scripting applications none of this matters.  For most purposes interpreted executions, and/or the compiler, now require such inconsequential time that one shouldn't care how the deed gets done.  But there are situations where it might:

  If the script does nontrivial computation, the difference between interpreted and compiled execution might matter.  (For implementations that always compile, the compilation cost is fixed, but happens upon each execution.)

  If the script is executed with high frequency, perhaps as the implementation of a web page, the cost of launching a heavyweight Lisp image in almost _any_ implementation is likely to be objectionable.  A lightweight C a.out has a small footprint in addition to the various .so libraries it uses, which will tend to stay loaded, and requires minimal startup execution overhead.  Most Common Lisp applications have a larger startup cost because Lip environments are, shall we say, bigger and more capable.

It would be nice to think further how startup overhead could be reduced with precompiled execution



On Sun, Mar 2, 2014 at 2:56 PM, Faré <fahree@gmail.com> wrote:
My cl-launch demo:

cl -sp lisp-stripper -i '(print-loc-count "asdf.lisp")'

Source code for lispwc:
#!/usr/bin/cl -sp lisp-stripper -E main
(defun main (argv)
  (if argv
      (map () 'print-loc-count argv)
      (print-loc-count *standard-input*)))

And of course:
for l in sbcl ccl clisp cmucl ecl abcl \
         scl allegro lispworks gcl xcl ; do
 cl-launch -l $l -i \
 '(format t "'$l': ~S~%" `#5(1 ,@`(2 3)))' \
 2>&1 | grep "^$l:" # LW, GCL are verbose
done

Backstory:

After recent exposure to Python at work, I grew an intense dislike for
that language, and realized that I could do everything in CL instead,
and that the remaining stumbling blocks to using CL as a "scripting
language" were quite small — just missing the ability to put
#!/usr/bin/cl in a script, and there you go.

And so, I added just this capability to cl-launch, improved it to have
some of the features of buildapp, and made sure it works without a
hitch on each of the 11 implementations with a command-line interface.
This in turn requires updating ASDF and UIOP, and so here we are with
ASDF 3.1.0.86.

Then, I found that I had to take the word out, and started editing
that way a paper that I'm preparing a paper for ELS 2014 (or else ILC
2014):
      ASDF3, or Why Lisp is Now an Acceptable Scripting Language

It's incredible how having to explain the code forces you to make it
actually simpler to use. Hence new option -sp in cl-launch, to load
a system and change the current package, all in one go. Hence also
having cl-launch build software with a sequence of --system --load --eval
instead of a single setup file and toplevel system like before:
people already understand a sequence of build commands.

Also new in ASDF3: command line argument support was improved with a
LispWorks workaround and a new argv0 function; with-input and
with-output accept pathnames as designating a file to open; the bundle
support was much improved and cleaned up; the upgrade mechanism was
slightly improved to cope with the class refactoring; bugs were found
and removed in pathname functions; a weird bug in SCL was worked
around.

Enjoy!

TODO: I'm considering modifying the default behavior of cl-launch to
launch a REPL and/or read commands from stdin, like a Unix shell does
when given no script and no commands to run. I'm reserving that for
another round of procrastination.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same
as to be right in doing it.     — G.K. Chesterton