Well, sure, if all your programs need is the OS and common libraries, deployment is easy. But this only restates the point. It's easy because those things are

Well, sure, if all your programs need is the OS and common libraries, deployment is easy. But this only restates the point. It's easy because those things are popular. Try deploying an executable that requires a shared library that you can't download with your package manager, and you're pretty much back into the same pain. Using the C ABI helps if you want to link against other code that uses it, though it isn't strictly necessary (pretty much all these language implementations have foreign call mechanisms). But this is a development issue, not a deployment issue. ECL does make it convenient to build standalone executables, but most CL implementations can also do this.