Any news about Erann Gat's "Locales" work? I was not at ILC, and haven't heard anything about its progress beyond the paper on his site. Reading his paper , http://www.flownet.com/gat/locales.pdf , "Locales" seemed pretty cool to me, though the name is of course a bit confusing thanks a strong association and near-unbreakable association of the word with human-language-localisation in my mind.

I was also left wondering:

how locales could fit in with the parts of CL where forms are defined to take implementation-dependent environment objects,

what issues there would be with replacing standard defun etc with Locales' equivalents for large bodies of existing code one might wish to modularise (corollary of what defining functions other than defun would need to be rejigged...)

how adoption of Locales might affect or simplify things like ASDF/mk:defsystem.

Just thought it might be worth mentioning...

Erann gave a demo of his locales at the CRACL meeting last night. I don't know if there was anything new, since I haven't read the paper.