Let’s say I have a big repo full of lisp. I want a program that uses some subset of this lisp. Similarly to if I had a big repo full of C programs and libraries and I wanted to build one of those programs (statically linking all the libraries it used). In CL, it is annoying and tricky to go from those files to an executable I can deploy. Typically you’d write some script to (use ASDF to) compile/load your various files and then dump the image specifying a binary. It’s a bit messy and not very portable.
I will never understand how people have such a rosy view of C development. Is it just that today people think there is only GNU make, and only GCC or clang?
Autotools used m4 because it was the most portable Unix tool, not because it's a good language to write your build scripts in...
Perhaps C was a poor example. I just mean “statically compiled language where files become objects and objects get linked into executables/libraries and this is done by a build system”.
Perhaps rust would have been a better example as there is less variety in build systems.
