dougk is one of the few people currently and immediately capable of such "long strides" I spoke of. He is continually improving SBCL in remarkable ways, especially under-the-hood work that just makes all Lisp applications better without additional work on the programmers' parts.

I attended the Vienna conference where he discussed such matters, and he has great ideas, but many of his play-nice-with-UNIX tools are still very bleeding edge and require you to be SBCL-developer-level in-the-know to use them.

I hope later this year that I'll be able to open up a full-time role for SBCL development as a part of my own job, in a similar way that Google employs dougk to work on SBCL. The only trouble will be finding a qualified applicant who can do the full-time work...