abc wrote:I've read somewhere recently that some people use CLISP for development but not for production.
I read that too, but I am not sure how widespread this is in practice. As far as I can tell most people use the same implementation for production and development.
abc wrote:Ignoring the licensing, is this due to the fact that an interpreted implementation of CL is much friendlier for development than a compiled one?
I don't think that is particularly true. In addition, I believe that Slime is mostly developed with SBCL, which means that it integrates better. CLISP might be better if one is attempting to use the naked terminal, since it uses readline and the non-slimeified debugger is slightly easier to handle in CLISP.
abc wrote:In a compiled one you need to recompile all forms that use a macro when you redefine it, right? Is this much of an issue?
It is very rarely an issue in my experience, because macros are rare enough and changed rarely enough that it is easy to just reload the entire system when they are changed. There is also slime-recompile-xref and slime-recompile-all-xrefs, which along with slime-who-macroexpands can recompile all expansion sites automatically.