Process communication with Guile

[Nicolas Neuss <Nicolas.Neuss@IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De>]

Dear Guile experts.

The problems I am interested in (solving of partial differential
equations) usually can be decomposed in such a way that a rather small
set of basic operations operating on large amounts of data are
combined to more complicated constructs.  This seems to be a perfect
place for using Guile as control language.  But since the interpreter
is quite large I would prefer to do it in such a way, that Guile is
sort of a client process to a server process written in C or C++ which
does the hard work.  This construction would also allow to execute the
client and server on different machines which might be very useful.

Therefore, the basic operation I need is communication between two
processes in one of the following ways:

  1) A Guile client process connects to an (already running) server
     process, sends messages and receives answers.

  2) A Guile process starts the "server" process and communicates
     with it.

My problem is that I don't know much about process communication
(even in C), and I don't know how to do the above task in the easiest
way.  Should I try sockets (how does one handle that from Guile?) or
is it better to use pipes (how to do this?)?  I would think that this
sort of problem is quite basic, and that there are references or even
sample programs doing this sort of thing.  Can anyone point out a
reference to me?

Thank you very much,

Nicolas Neuss.

-- 
Dr. Nicolas Neuss
Email: Nicolas.Neuss@IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De
WWW:   <http://www.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/~Nicolas.Neuss>