Re: Several questions.

[Marius Vollmer]

Dirk Herrmann <address@hidden> writes:

> * Interrupts are disabled until guile enters interactive mode.  This has
>   tricked me, since the after-gc-hook does not get called.  What are the
>   reasons that interrupts are only allowed in such a restrictive way?

I'm also unsure whether libguile should take over the usual Unix
signals.  It seems rude for a library to do this.  Can we avoid that?
That is, can we have a scheme where signal handlers can be attached
from Scheme as well as from C, and the two worlds cooperate nicely?

> * scm_smobs is a malloc'd array that gets resized for every new
>   smob.  With preemptive threading, this will not work well:  It would be
>   necessary to guard every access to scm_smobs with a mutex.

Does pthreads offer something like a atomic update for a pointer?
With such a thing, we could atomically swap in the new smobtable.

> * Building guile with  make "CFLAGS=-g -DSCM_DEBUG=1"  shows some
>   inconsistent uses of DEFER/ALLOW ints.

Worse, it fails for me with

    $ guile
    ints already disabled (at smob.c:288)
    ERROR: Unbound variable: *top-level-lookup-closure*

I don't feel competent to look into this.  Anyone?