The function ide-open-a-listener opens a Remote Listener, by calling start-remote-listener on the client side of the connection.
If connection is non-nil, it is used, otherwise ide-open-a-listener calls ide-find-remote-debugging-connection to find a connection. See ide-find-remote-debugging-connection for further details.
timeout specifies the length of time (in seconds) to wait before returning. timeout defaults to 10 and nil means waiting indefinitely.
When successful, ide-open-a-listener returns process-remote-object, which is a remote object (see remote-object-p) corresponding to the client process object that runs the read-eval-print loop. When a timeout occurs, process-remote-object is nil.
When process-remote-object is nil it does not necessarily means a failure and the Remote Listener may open later anyway. In particular, you can use :timeout 0 to avoid any waiting.
LispWorks User Guide and Reference Manual - 20 Sep 2017