Delivery does three distinct things:
Most of the discussion in this manual concerns the technical issues arising from this last point. Note that you can deliver such that the system does not try to make the image smaller, and most of the technical issues are irrelevant in this case.
The process of creating standalone executables or dynamic libraries is called delivery.
The principle behind application delivery is quite simple: an application does not use everything in the LispWorks development environment when it is running, so there is no need for those unused parts of LispWorks to be in the image. Delivery can discard the unnecessary code and create a single image file that contains just what is needed to run the application.
Because the delivered application (sometimes called a runtime ) is smaller, it can reduce virtual memory paging and thereby run faster than it did under LispWorks. Delivery can also actively speed code up by, for example, converting single-method generic functions into ordinary functions. Packing it all into a single file means it is simple to start up and can be run independently of LispWorks.
LispWorks Delivery User Guide - 10 Aug 2017