Re: Missing core functions

[Martin Grabmueller]

> From: Gary Houston <address@hidden>
> Date: 5 Mar 2001 23:58:37 -0000
> 
> To reduce the perception of code bloat it's probably about time to
> place the system call wrappers into separate modules.  This can be
> done without moving them out of libguile -- see the (ice-9 rdelim)
> experiment.

With `code bloat' I meant the actual size of libguile, what do you
mean?  The number of primitives available without using modules?

> When adding new interfaces it's a good time to consider what modules
> could be created, since there's no backwards compatibility problem
> with requiring a use-modules statment.
> 
> > Otherwise, I would like to implement them.
> 
> That would be great.  Good luck with ioctl.

I thought about snarfing some of the ioctls from the system headers as
with the signal and error numbers and then support some of the ioctl
calls available under Linux and Solaris (the systems I have access
to), but now that I visually grepped thru the headers I must admit
that it probably was not a good idea.

Now I think that if someone needs a Scheme wrapper for a particular
ioctl, she is better served by writing a small shared object Guile
module and implementing it in C herself.  This is not difficult and
someone dealing with ioctls is probably clever enough to do that.

In case someone thinks ioctl in Guile is a good idea anyway, please
tell me and I will think more about it.  Another option is to make
such a C module and include it as an example/in the documentation.

Regards,
  'martin