In some of my deployment contexts I have found ECL (ie just a C lib) more often supported than cffi, and I am somewhat used to C (it's a domain specific language for working with C operating systems in lisp, right).
I guess the c2ffi autogenerated stuff is nice and complete, on the other hand I think a la carte is also nice (alright, maybe shouldn't call writing C nice...).
Edit: For example if I were to want to conditionally pledge my game on openbsd in ecl :
#+(and openbsd ecl) (progn (ffi:clines "#include <unistd.h>") (let ((ret 0)) (declare (:int ret)) (ffi:c-progn (ret) "#0 = pledge(\"stdio rpath\", NULL);" (unless (zerop ret) (error "pledge")))) (mapc 'print (directory #p"./*.*")) (uiop:quit)
it's not clear to me that I would have gained a lot by dragging in https://github.com/cffi-posix/cffi-pledge . Though this example shows how gnarly sffi is too I guess !