So this month's SBCL will be quite exciting, in that it provides a framework for experimentation. Yes, we have a contrib/ directory, wherein things that aren't portable enough to go into a cross-vendor repository and yet aren't stable, documented or mature enough to be included as a supported extension, can live or die as determined by the user community (all two of you).

This can be viewed as a way of involving the users in the direction of the project, or as a way of punting on the difficult decisions. Be that as it may, as of Wednesday, SBCL users will be able to do

* (require 'asdf)
NIL
* (require 'sb-bsd-sockets)
[...]
NIL
* (make-instance 'sb-bsd-sockets:inet-socket :type :stream :protocol :tcp)
#<SB-BSD-SOCKETS:INET-SOCKET descriptor 5 {30FBA761}>

As well as an interface to the BSD socket API, and asdf itself, there is an implementation of rotate-byte, a hack to make pseudo-standalone executables, and a package that hooks in to the read-eval-print-loop to give a different interface.

Cool beans.