Isn't Common Lisp's save-lisp-and-die roughly analogous Pyinstaller? I mean they both work but nobody seems to be using them. In my experience Common Lisp code is most commonly deployed with an interpreter.
If one compiles code or loads compiled code to something like SBCL and dumps an image, you can both run it directly from that image AND have still have the development tools included.
Some Common Lisp implementations also have delivery tools which create applications without development tools. Some applications though include the development tools, because they are thought to be extended by the user. For example a CL-based CAD system might exposed Common Lisp as the scripting language for CAD extensions.
But you didn't say anything about the original question. Have you seen Common Lisp code deployed as an executable or as source code?
ECL and CLISP also use compilers. ECL usually compiles to C, which then is compiled to native code via a C compiler. CLISP has its own virtual machine, which is the target of its compiler. Don't know what ABCL does, would have to look it up - but in the end it usually would execute JVM code, which gets compiled by its JIT compiler.
Question of code deployment. I have seen deployment as an executable, deployment as an executable with also loads compiled code (for patches) and deployment as source code. Especially commercial applications and/or end-user applications tend to deploy as executable. For example ScoreCloud is a LispWorks application as an executable and can be bought on Apple's Mac app store.
My Lisp Machine at home boots into a Lisp image which contains a whole operating system as compiled Lisp code. That's exotic, but many other Lisp development environments already come as compiled Lisp executable. For example on the Mac and on ARM64/Linux I use LispWorks. On the Mac it is the usual Mac application bundle, where the executable already contains much of the IDE and then loads some code on demand from compile code files.
> CLISP has its own virtual machine, which is the target of its compiler
Then CPython is also a compiler? and Lua?
Originally interpreters were implementations which execute source code - which in Lisp is widely available. For example SBCL for a long time only had a native code AOT compiler, but now also includes s-expressions.
Famous is also the Lisp interpreter in Lisp from McCarthy, where he defined the core language in itself. See the paper from Paul Graham about that: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/jmc.pdf That's a very primitive Lisp interpreter - many real ones are implemented in C, Assembler...
Just be aware, that in the Lisp world 'Interpreter' means something very specific: an interpreter of the source language.
Wow, super impressive. You didn't post this on reddit yet :)
And ECL does ultimately compile down to machine code if you include "compile the resulting C output" in the compilation process, though this is optional.