SBCL Unicode work is progressing well. It's nearly at the stage where it becomes useful: it's
already at the stage where we can do silly demos such as in
this screenshot.
Clearly, this isn't going to make it into sbcl 0.8.15; however, I have hopes that it will into 0.8.16 (or should that be 0.9.0 or even 0.1point0.pre1? We still have
a little work to do before everybody's happy with supporting a 1.0 release: the issue isn't so much the stability of the code (which was engineered to last — parts of it are decades old!) as the desirability of supporting a suboptimal interface as stable; the main benefit from a developer's point of view of a pre-1.0 release is the ability to laugh away complaints about lack of backwards compatibility. Such days may soon be behind us.