Struggling with common lisp libraries

Question

I've learned scheme and quickly mastered a lot of it, then did a project in it just fine. Literally took me days to finish. I'm now trying to learn common lisp to get a feel for that and now I'm just really really struggling with trying to learn asdf. It seems to be common knowledge how to use it with libraries but I'm baffled. I guess it's because most lisp programs are made and run inside the repl because that all works fine. It's when I try to compile it to an executable where I'm loosing my place.

Is there anyone who can give me any advice on it or point me to a tutorial for it? I really want to be able to make an executable to give to people without having to explain how to install sbcl and (require) it then run it. I just want to learn to do something substantial in lisp that I haven't been able to do with scheme.

I guess I could use scheme and use ffi to get c libraries to work, but I have no experience with c. I'm just a web developer learning lisp for my own personal reasons. Of course learning some c and ffi may not take as long as this haha.
Thanks

Answer 1

This is not exactly what you asked for, but it might help.

I never could get ASDF to work very well, either. Somebody pointed me at clbuild instead, which is a slightly different approach to a similar problem. It's worked pretty well for me so far.

Answer 2

I really want to be able to make an executable to give to people without having to explain how to install sbcl and (require) it then run it.

You do not need ASDF in order to produce a 'stand-alone' executable. Most implementations provide means to save an executable image, but how to do this (and if it is to be provided at all) is not mentioned in the standard.

In general, you would load your code into your running image and then "dump" that image.

In SBCL for example, you would use sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die; CCL has ccl:save-application. You will have to look in your implementation's documentation in order to find out how to do it.

I don't have SBCL here at the moment, but this minimal example should work (untested):

(defun do-it () (format t "hello world~%"))
(sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die "hello" :toplevel #'do-it :executable t)

This is a working example using CCL:

Welcome to Clozure Common Lisp Version 1.6-dev-r14287M-trunk  (LinuxX8632)!
? (defun do-it () (format t "hello world~%"))
DO-IT
? (ccl:save-application "hello" :toplevel-function #'do-it :prepend-kernel t)
[danlei@susi ~/build/ccl]% ./hello
hello world

These executable images may be of rather big size, unless your implementation provides something like a tree-shaker, but I do not think that this should be a problem nowadays.

You can find a detailed example for clisp in another SO question about this topic.

ASDF Documentation