Re: libguile thread safety

[Chris Vine <chris@cvine.freeserve.co.uk>]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2014 11:22:13 -0400
Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> wrote:
> Chris Vine <chris@cvine.freeserve.co.uk> writes:
> 
> > Has thread-safe module loading turned out to be too difficult to
> > do, or is it still something that is likely to happen in the future?
> 
> I consider this to be an important issue, and I still intend to fix
> it. However, fixing it in such a way that I could confidently believe
> would not cause problems for existing users (who might do unusual
> things with Guile's module system) is indeed non-trivial.
> 
> On the other hand, the lack of thread-safety in module loading doesn't
> seem to be causing problems for most users in practice.  I suspect
> this is because most programs load their modules during
> initialization, and rarely (if ever) load modules afterwards.
> 
> Therefore, I'm considering fixing this in git master, which will
> become Guile 2.2, and not in the stable-2.0 branch.
> 
> What do you think?

I am a user and know little of the internal implementation details of
libguile, so I think you are better able to assess the likelihood of
disruption to other guile-2.0 users. The achievable seems better than
looking for perfection.

I have found libguile quite useful for asynchronous text processing in
C++ programs, and because it was simple to implement I have included
provision for it in a small library I maintain:
http://cxx-gtk-utils.sourceforge.net/2.2/namespaceCgu_1_1Extension.html .
I guess that that is the extent of my stake in the issue.

Chris