Hi! Long time listener, first time caller. This is my first time using a mailing list so lets hope this works.
For the past week or so, I've been noodling away at a way to compile GNU Guile + scripts to a standalone binary. This is mostly motivated by the fact that Guile seems to have a lot of interesting stuff happening these days, and it would be fun to be able to make a game in it or something that I could distribute on itch.io (like what the Spritely Institute have been doing lately) I've been keeping a log of my trials and tribulations here: https://forum.systemcrafters.net/t/how-to-compile-a-simple-guile-program-into-a-standalone-executable/1751/6 The TL;DR is that I forked a repository someone else made, and got a standalone executable working. Yippie! https://github.com/ValorZard/guile-embed-example How it works is that it expects a "main.scm" file to exist in the root to execute, and then the main.scm recursively loads everything in the src/ folder. However, this only works if someone has already installed Guile on their computer, which kinda defeats the purpose. I started attempting to build Guile from source by adding it as a CMake ExternalProject. ``` cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.16) project(guile-embed-example VERSION 0.0.1) include(ExternalProject) ExternalProject_Add( GUILE GIT_REPOSITORY "https://codeberg.org/guile/guile.git"; GIT_TAG "main" PREFIX ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/guile SOURCE_DIR ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/guile CMAKE_ARGS -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX} CONFIGURE_COMMAND cd ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/guile && guix shell --container -f ./guix.scm BUILD_COMMAND cd ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/guile && guix build -f guix.scm INSTALL_COMMAND "" ) find_package(PkgConfig) pkg_check_modules(GUILE guile-3.0 REQUIRED IMPORTED_TARGET) add_executable(guile-test guile-test.cc) target_link_libraries(guile-test PkgConfig::GUILE) file(COPY main.scm DESTINATION "${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}") file(COPY src DESTINATION "${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}") target_compile_options(guile-test PRIVATE $<$<CONFIG:Debug>:-Wall -Wextra -pedantic -Wshadow -Wunused -Wconversion> ) install(TARGETS guile-test DESTINATION "." RUNTIME DESTINATION bin) ``` That didn't turn out well since Guile relies so much on Guix. And Guix dumps the binaries it compiles into /gnu/store and not inside of my CMake project, which is not good. Besides, I also feel like using CMake is a losing battle anyways, since it would tie it to a C++ build system. Instead, what I'd probably want to do is have a guile script that runs and builds everything together. Fortunately, there is prior art: https://git.dthompson.us/chickadee/tree/chickadee/cli/bundle.scm, which was used for davexunit.itch.io/bonnie-bee<https://davexunit.itch.io/bonnie-bee> https://davexunit.itch.io/super-bloom The big problem I can think of when it comes to making a more generalized guile build system is that guile relies heavily on the Guix ecosystem, and everything in Guix is installed globally in /gnu/store. (Unless you do guix pack -RR of course). I don't know Guix SUPER well, but I think you could probably have your guile script inside a guix pack, and then run the script once you unzip it. However, I don't think that would work on windows, and also isn't the one-click executable I want. So I guess after all of this, I really want to hear your thoughts on this effort. Should I keep trying to make this work? I'd love to submit a Pull Request at some point making this all work, but I want to know where I should put my attention into. ________________________________ Srayan Jana
