cl-babel 0.3.0+20091229-1 (i386 binary) in ubuntu maverick

 Written completely in Common Lisp, not using a foreign library.
 .
 It strives to achieve decent performance. Most of the
 encoding/decoding algorithms have been adapted from Clozure CL's source.
 .
 Another important goal is reusability. Similarly to SBCL, it defines an
 interface wherein the algorithms can be reused between a variety of data types
 so long we're dealing with conversions between octets and unicode code points.
 .
 Babel comes with converters between strings and octet vectors but can be
 easily extended to deal with, e.g., strings and foreign memory, vectors and
 Closure's runes, etc...