That (deployment is via a customized image) is the thing I find most awkward.
Somewhere, I have a copy of a commercial LISP for Windows which would compile to an executable --- apparently this sort of thing is still possible, but it's not widely known/used, and sadly Jean-Marie Hullot's "SOS Interface" for the Mac was co-opted to NeXTstep:
https://denninginstitute.com/itcore/userinterface/GUIHistory...
I'd dearly love to see a RAD (Rapid Application Development) tool using LISP w/ a nifty UI for working up a GUI which would compile to something easily deployed (maybe HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript) as a stand-alone/single-file web application?
You probably want Clog: https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog
Clog is very cool. As an alternative, I have recently been building Common Lisp UIs with webview (I have two example webview apps as recent additions to my Common Lisp book).
re: heap based delivery: not a good idea. But, I sometimes do heap based development when I have a ton of data I want loaded every dev session, then I save a SBCL image, and restart my Lisp environment using my custom image.
sbcl can compile to a single executable (the image is embedded in the binary). From a deployment standpoint, the only real issue is if you depend on a dynamically linked C library like OpenSSL.
I used to do this to build command line utilities in SBCL, with millisecond initialization times. Good technique, and compress the image so executables are fairly small.
random note: it's possible to incorporate C libs at compile time, e.g.:
https://github.com/sionescu/sbcl-goodies
Yeah, I’ve done that in a slightly hacky way (manually run the various stages of the sbcl build and statically link c libs before building the actual image).
Docker deploys is a bit like that I think. Overall, I think many languages and programming systems pick up pieces from each other nowadays. PHP almost by accident can be quite stateless. Yet it's looking more like Java. Many things which could be deployed as an executable, are deployed as VM images. I'm sure we can come up with more things...