Robert Smith and Eitarow Fukamachi have started a really interesting new project: Quickutil. The idea is to do for small Lisp utilities what Quicklisp does for Lisp libraries. Smith explains it all on his SYMBO1ICS IDEAS blog but the TL;DR is that while the Alexandria project collects Lisp utilities, the project likes to thoroughly vet each utility resulting in very slow uptake and problem resolution. Quickutil is meant to help ameliorate this problem by providing a place to collect these utilities in a timely manner, perhaps while the Alexandria project is doing its vetting. The project is still in beta at this point but looks to be off to a good start.
Lispers, of course, love to write small utilities so you might think that there won’t be much demand for this sort of service but I believe there will be for a couple of reasons. First, programmers are often under deadline pressure (and sometimes just lazy, of course) and will often find the service useful. Second, nobody knows about everything and sometimes you need a utility that implements an algorithm that you don’t know the details of. For example, you might need to check the primality of large integers but not know much about the Miller-Rabin algorithm or the other usual methods. In those cases, it’s a huge win to have the utility there ready to use.
In any event, I’m excited about the project and am looking forward to seeing how it works out.