There's a pull request that can effectively fix this, by finally exposing the Chez Scheme C library. Then you can finally write custom boot kernels. I pinged on it recently but nobody updated. I might try resubmitting it.

I actually have a full demonstration of using Chez to build a full "Unix application" that works 'just as you would expect'. Comes with complete Chez support: profile-guided rebuilds, coverage support, C extensions, some basic test stuff, a custom C boot kernel, and utility for portable .tar.gz builds. It even correctly copies out the boot files for a reidstributable build.

I could have extended this to "unpack the boot file out of my own elf executable" for a truly reusable binary but that seemed overkill. Also, if you keep the boot files, it then becomes possible to still drop into a Chez prompt and load your boot file from there for early debugging, which can be convenient and I didn't want to spend more time on that.

But, uhhhh, you're right if you want a one off binary, Chicken or something is way better. I spent like a week working on that skeleton so I could start working on my application itself. And my Makefile to support all this is extremely intense. But it works pretty well now and is very reusable and generic.

I'll get around to releasing it now I suppose!