Libraries felt like a problem at the beginning, but in the end have not tended to be an issue for us. So far, we have been able to either find suitable librarie

Libraries felt like a problem at the beginning, but in the end have not tended to be an issue for us. So far, we have been able to either find suitable libraries, or use FFI to hook into 3rd party code. At times it seems like we have the kitchen sink in there when you look at the dependencies, but asdf keeps it pretty manageable. The biggest issue we had was with a limitation in SBCL's serve-event implementation. It turns out it uses select, which caused some nasty issues for us when file descriptors climbed over 1024. In our case, we are handling thousands of persistent ssl connections on the back end. We were using epoll to service all of these connections, but the database library clsql was using serve-event. Under certain situations, we would end up handing select an FD > 1024, and things would go all pear-shaped. The fix was to patch serve-event itself to use epoll. It is a pretty rough patch at this point, but it works and keeps us going. The other area we had to punt was with our installer generation. That was as much because we are running our servers on Linux as anything else. We have a special windows server that creates the custom MSI files for each account. Some times the power is a bit too much, as well. While patching a running server with fixes is cool, I will fully admit to a couple gotchas when we thought we were making obvious fixes that turned out to have not-so-obvious repercussions. In those cases, the problem always existed between the keyboard and chair. We do a better job of checking things offline before rolling them out. I know #lisp has a pretty bad reputation, but there are some very smart people that hang out there, and they want to see Common Lisp succeed. In general it is a much saner place than c.l.l.