I'm assuming that for whatever you're doing, traditional OS distribution isn't what you want. It's possible to bundle Guile + all necessary shared libraries + all necessary Guile modules from the standard library + a wrapper script to launch your application. Up to you to figure out how you build such a bundle. There be dragons, but it's doable. I've had decent success doing so for Lisp Game Jam submissions. For example: https://davexunit.itch.io/super-bloom
Guix can also be used to create redistributable bundles. The resulting bundles are much larger than something hand-crafted but tend to work well. This was done for another Lisp Game Jam submission: https://cwebber.itch.io/fantasary If you don't want to do that, just ask users to install Guile 3 or something first. Lots of software for VM platforms has this expectation. It will be a long wait, but native compiled standalone executables is something Guile should get... eventually. We're going to have standalone WebAssembly modules first via Guile Hoot, which should hopefully solve a lot of the same problems that need to be solved for native compilation. And to answer your original question: Yes, it's very possible to write programs only in Guile. For example, Haunt, my static site generator, is written in pure Guile. Guix is almost entirely written in Guile. I will use the FFI to call C libraries from Guile, but never the other way around. It used to be that Guile was for adding a "scripting language" to C programs but it's a legacy use case, IMO. Write your programs in Scheme and reach out to C libraries only when necessary. Extend, rather than embed. Hope this helps. Best of luck, - Dave On Wed, Oct 18, 2023 at 11:07 AM CToID <funk...@yandex.com> wrote: > > Greg Troxel <g...@lexort.com> said: > > The same way you distribute Java programs, python programs and perl > > programs. You ask they they install the langauge environment as part of > > your instructions > > > Is it possible to also ship guile itself with the application? > >
