Actual compile support

[Lazerbeak12345]

One of my biggest problems I've had with racket is that it doesn't have an option to compile. The benefits would be:

• ease of distribution of production software built on the racket framework
• speed
• perhaps size? (the presence of eval might mean that significant parts of the code pipeline would need to be bundled)

It is worth noting that when using raco exe it does convert to a binary format (as do a few other commands), but if you dig into this exe (in my case a linux binary), it is not standalone, and is actually not even a binary in the usual sense.

[Lazerbeak12345]

Interesting thoughts about Chez Scheme and compiled binaries: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48061220/can-chez-scheme-produce-compiled-binaries

[Lazerbeak12345]

Linked in that article is this tool: https://github.com/gwatt/chez-exe

[spdegabrielle]

Hi @Lazerbeak12345
Racket uses the same incremental native-code compiler as Chez Scheme. The ‘CS’ compiler has been the default compiler since version 8.0. (8.3 was just released )

In interactive mode, this compilation occurs automatically and on-the-fly. Tools like raco make and raco setup marshal compiled bytecode to a file, so that you do not have to compile from source every time that you run a program. See Compilation and Configuration: raco for more information on generating bytecode files.

For the CS implementation of Racket, the main bytecode format is non-portable machine code.

Racket Reference, 19 19 Performance: 19.3 Bytecode, Machine Code, and Just-in-Time (JIT) Compilers

There is a small sample with instructions to create a stand-alone executable at https://github.com/racket-templates/cli-command

I hope this helps
Best wishes
Stephen

[LiberalArtist]

I think the part you're missing is probably raco distribute: Sharing Stand-Alone Executables. In particular, this advice may be relevant:

The number of needed support files depends in part on the way that executables for a distribution are created. Supplying --embed-dlls or --orig-exe to raco exe reduces the need for support files, but at the expense of making the distribution larger if it contains multiple executables.