Conversely, I really like the bencode format, parsers are really simple to write.

there's some movement in the channel #unrepl to define a new REPL protocol based on EDN (also see the repo: https://github.com/cgrand/unrepl)

with unrepl and cider, it seems the question is whether it’d be more work to port cider or to start from scratch?

@jfntn backporting to what?

I meant porting

well there is inf-clojure if you need something different, cider requires nrepl but it would be awesome to have a faster nrepl startup time...which is actually Clojure startup time mainly...