On: Why Lisp macros are cool, a Perl perspective (2005)

That's because different implementations provide different ways to generate executables. Some are simple, some are complex.

For SBCL one needs to call a function, which creates the executable image.

http://www.sbcl.org/manual/index.html#Function-sb_002dext-sa...

There are more complex machineries for application generation, though.