It turns out that Corman Lisp has real difficulties dealing with compilation. Sometimes the compilation fails, other times the loading of compiled files falls over.
My proposed fix: Add the following to swank-loader.lisp just before the call to compile-files-if-needed-serially:
#+cormanlisp (defun compile-files-if-needed-serially (files) "Corman Lisp has trouble with compiled files, so load them from source instead." (dolist (file files) (load file :verbose t)))
Thus loading swank from source. This works just fine (and is just as fast, if not faster, than loading fasl files).
Is this accepted style, or should I do this some other way?
And if it is accepted style, should I #-cormanlisp the first definition of compile-files-if-needed-serially?