Ask HN: What work have you done with stable distributions?

I come from a finance background, so bear with me. I am currently taking a senior level mathematical probability/stats class. The professor of the class has informed me that the frontier of mathematical finance has started to deal with Levy alpha-stable distributions. I've found some GNU libraries focused on this content, but I was wondering if anyone has any actual experience implementing financial software using this distribution? If so, what is your opinion of the difficulty level in implementing it? Do you know of any specific papers I could take a look at?

Any help would be much appreciated.