Hello! I'm one of the maintainers of universal-ctags (though certainly not the most active one). My interest is more on the packaging and distribution side of things, as well as maintaining the website (http://ctags.io <http://ctags.io/>).
Some of the work that has been done up till this point has been committing old patches that have been sitting in the mailing list for years. A lot of it has been modernizing the parsers and adding a ton of test coverage. In terms of hard performance metrics, I'm not aware of any, but if you open an issue about it in the Github repo (ideally with specific scenarios that you want to measure), I don't think anyone would be opposed to the idea. We were considering the use of OpenSUSE's OBS to package universal ctags for all the distros + travis for mac builds and appveyor for windows builds, but nothing has been set in stone yet. If someone were to provide the necessary files for debian packaging in a PR, I would happily review and merge it myself (feel free to @cweagans if you open a PR for this). In terms of a stable release, there are no formalized plans, but it's definitely coming up. I'm hoping to get something out the door by Q1 2016. Over the next week or two, I'll start organizing a release. Things are fairly stable right now, but there are definitely some things that we want to wrap up before being locked into a 1.0 release. We might look at doing smaller 0.x.x releases in the mean time, but there's been some resistance to that idea. Hope this helps!
