I've checked a bunch of implementations now. bt:*supports-threads-p* and tbnl::*supports-threads-p* are T for the implementations that work well with Hunchentoot. Typically both variables are NIL due to the underlying implementation lacking thread support:

Success
Partial Failure
Failure
Cheers,

Andrew Pennebaker
www.yellosoft.us



On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 9:08 AM, Edi Weitz <edi@weitz.de> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 11:07 AM, Andrew Pennebaker
<andrew.pennebaker@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have installed ABCL, SBCL, CLISP, and ECL on Ubuntu and Mac OS X, using
> Aptitude and MacPorts respectively. In every case, Hunchentoot's start
> function hung, because the CL implementation failed to include thread
> support.

That should not happen.  Can you check the values of
bt:*supports-threads-p* and tbnl::*supports-threads-p*?  Are they
correct?  If so, the default taskmaster should be
one-thread-per-connection-manager which doesn't need threads.