Re: Subprocess API.

[Chris Vine]

On Mon, 25 Sep 2017 19:59:39 +0100
Chris Vine <address@hidden> wrote:
> ... you could consider launching the new process in C code via the
> guile FFI so you can ensure that no non-async-signal-safe code is
> called at the wrong time; but presumably you would still have by some
> means to prevent the garbage collector from being able to start a
> memory reclaiming run in the new process after the fork and before the
> exec, and again I do not know how you would do that.  You would also
> need to block system asyncs before forking (and unblock after the fork
> in the original process) but that is trivial to do.

On reflection I don't think there is an issue with the garbage
collector if you adopted this approach.  After forking there is only
one thread running in the new process - the thread of execution of the
forking thread - and provided that the new process does not attempt to
allocate memory after the fork and before the exec, I doubt the garbage
collector has a way in which it can be provoked to begin trying to
reclaim memory in the new process.