Library configuration in Common Lisp: an example

I have been dodging the issue of configuration for LLA for a while, but eventually I had to come up with a solution for the revised version that I pushed to Github yesterday.

LLA users may need to configure two things: the location and name of libraries that they want to use, and whether LLA should use 64-bit integers to interface with BLAS/LAPACK (this is rarely needed, even on 64-bit platforms, as many implementations still use 32-bit integers). In the previous versions of LLA, I tried to do this with read-time conditionals (based on trivial-features) but this was not satisfactory as it is impossible to figure out the list of libraries from nothing but the platform information — for example, a Linux user could use ATLAS or MKL.

I read Maintaining Portable Lisp Programs by Christophe Rhodes and also asked on cl-pro, where I got a lot of good suggestions and decided to follow the advice of Pascal Costanza. This is how configuration works at the moment for LLA:

1. The user may define a variable *lla-configuration* in the CL-USER package. The variable should contain a plist of configuration options, eg :libraries. The variable does not need to be bound, and it can be NIL or incomplete: the user only needs to deal with configuration when he wants to override the defaults of the library. LLA makes an effort to come up with sensible platform-specific defaults.
2. When loaded/compiled, LLA checks whether cl-user::*lla-configuration* is bound, and if it is, it uses the corresponding values. If the variable is not bound or doesn't contain the desired property, a default value is used instead.

Internally, some features are implemented by pushing symbols like lla::int64 to *features*. I have do admit that I didn't even consider the possibility of package qualifiers in read-time conditionals before I read the appropriate sections of the Hyperspec, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense as it helps to avoid name clashes. LLA also removes its own symbols from *features* if they don't belong there: this means that you can reload the library with a different configuration without restating your CL image.