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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

Racket can supposedly compile standalone packages with the raco compile command (IIRC). Does anyone have experience with this?

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I do, it was extremely useful to quickly whip out a GUI doing some stuff and share it with colleagues under Windows/macOS/Linux.

Cons:

- 200MiB archives

Pros:

- I can develop a GUI doing some stuff on proprietary binary files, extracting & converting data, generating a handful of plots in a couple of days and have all my colleagues enjoy it without any issue.

I haven't used it beyond just trying it out once or twice. But a "hello world" application in the Idris2 language compiles to a 17kb racket file (the default backend is chez, but it also does racket and javascript).

If I run `raco exe` on this, I get a 57MB file. On mac, it's only linking system libraries. (For Idris2 programs, there is an Idris support library that is dynamically loaded.)

I haven't tested transporting it to another system (my test was on an arm mac, so I don't have another system to test that on).

They aren't standalone executables, they need to be distributed along with the lib folder that includes the racket runtime.

Sorry, I meant to respond to this but went to the parent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35392704

Surely the lib can be included statically no like Lua does no?

Doesn't raco make followed by raco exe produce fully standalone (except libc) executables? I believe some platforms need an additional raco distribute step.

Oh, raco exe is probably what I was thinking of.

At least in some cases, you need the options --orig-exe (Posix) or --embed-dlls (Windows) to make the binary standalone. For me that worked for command line programs. The options are described at https://docs.racket-lang.org/raco/exe.html . You can use both options at the same time, regardless of running Posix or Windows.

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