Oops, forgot to mention that this is a total hack that I would never put in production. I'm actually very curious about the atomicity of ASDF loads, and I don't know how it works. I wouldn't expect it to be for example atomic with respect to building several dependencies, but maybe it is.

The difference from the CGI model is that the Common Lisp runtime is stateful. In this particular experiment, I was working on a phone menu system, and it was really convenient to have the state of that system as Lisp variables.