Next: Building standalone executables, Previous: What can ECL do?, Up: Building programs
ECL supports two types of compilation. One is bytecodes compilation. This process is performed on-the-fly, as you load source files with lisp code. This leads to a series of bytes for each instruction, the so called "bytecodes". These bytecodes are interpreted in a virtual machine, which is written in C and which is reasonably fast.
The other type of compilation is the so-called "native" compilation. This process consists on translating the lisp source file to C language. The intermediate file is later compiled using a C compiler. The result is an object file which may have different purposes.
compile-file
. These object files typically have
the .fas extension, and can be loaded with load
. They cannot be used
to build libraries nor standalone executable programs.
compile-file
with the keyword argument
:system-p set to true. The object file typically has the .o
extension. It cannot be loaded with load
, but it can be used to build
libraries, standalone executable programs, or larger FASL files.