It errors out with guile: symbol lookup error: [...]/libgsl.so: undefined symbol: cblas_dscal Loading libgslcblas.so into the Scheme image doesn't help, it errors out the same. That's why I'm thinking it's not a Guile Scheme problem, but a library one: GSL C code breaks with no knowledge of CBLAS. The suggested fix is to link libgsl.so against libgslcblas.so (or any other CBLAS library?), so that the functions from the latter are available in the former. that seems to be what Arch package does (https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/gsl/), at least. Although I admit this is a strange circular behavior, it makes sense too: CBLAS is an implementation detail for BLAS support in GSL, and should be linked as such. I'm not knowledgeable enough in the ways of building GSL (or any complex C software really), so I cannot come up with a proper patch. Hopefully that's enough info for someone to act on. Acknowledgements: Huge thanks to Arun Isaac who helped me debug this problem! Thanks, -- Artyom Bologov.