@juhoteperi: I had a play with trying to cache the connection this morning. For some reason, the nrepl socket keeps spitting out data, even after you're "finished." I keep getting var names read out to me on subsequent reads.
So I've stashed those changes for now. I have fixed a bug, but I need to realign my master... because I've been doing some funny stuff with git. You won't run into it unless you're not connected to a repl, and even then, it just opens a message, then disappears. So not urgent.