(Only tangentially related to asdf; apologies if this is noise; please suggest a better channel.)
I just pushed cl-launch 4.1.1.1, which minimally implements support for a --dispatched-entry feature that's mostly compatible with Xach's buildapp. Differences are:
1- like cl-launch in general, it works on all command-line Lisp implementations supported by ASDF, not just on SBCL and CCL
2- I don't do as much error checking as Xach; in case of conflict, last one wins.
3- I accept UIOP-style function designators for the main function, not just symbol designators, see uiop:ensure-function.
Background: I'm more and more replacing my shell-scripts with CL scripts, but the startup time of a script can be very high if we load from fasl every time, even when no compilation is needed. On the other hand, dumping one image per script is expensive, with the smallest CL implementation (CLISP) taking about 16MB for every script. Therefore, I implemented --dispatched-entry in a way mostly compatible with buildapp. I can then dump a single image for all my scripts, and they start super fast, evaluate super fast, and only occupy a few tens of megabytes once.
--dispatched-entry is implemented as a thin layer that delegates everything to a small new library call cl-launch-dispatch, to be distributed with cl-launch. That means it will actually slow things down a tiny bit if you use it without dumping an image, but won't slow things down at all if you don't use it and don't dump an image.
Enjoy!
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org Democracy is a religion too. It's the worship of jackals by jackasses. — H. L. Mencken