PS: interesting point about the surprising slowness of SLIME.
just to make sure, i meant the slowness of the *development* of slime.
Interesting indeed, but lets spend more time fixing and improving it than evaluating the interest of such discussions :-)
long story short, i (and a couple of my colleagues) used to have even the commit bit and we used to invest a non-marginal amount of time into working on slime, but not anymore. some of our work is still there (e.g. making fuzzy completion's UI usable), and i still keep rebasing a minimal set of fixes for really annoying bugs/features in my fork, but these days it's much more about lowering annoyance than making slime any better, and with as little effort as possible.
which is sad, especially if i'm not alone with this attitude, and i have heard similar sentiments.