Re: guile and pthreads

[Russ McManus <russell.mcmanus@gs.com>]

(nobody) writes:

> (please cc me, I'm not on this list)
> It seems not to be possible to use guile from more than one
> thread simultaniously. Is there any way to have
> - one thread doing an interactive guile shell
> - one thread just reading from variables modified by the
>   user (in the interactive shell)
> This would be very nice for debugging purposes and dynamic
> configuring of parameters.

The above is true if you are referring to OS level threads.  guile
ships with a user level threads library, that actually only uses a
single OS thread.  Using this library, called qthreads, it is possible
to write a guile program that performs as you wish.  But this would
really be an illusion, because only one OS thread would ever really be
active as far as guile is concerned.

This question comes up an awful lot, so I think that the guile sources
should be branched, and that access should be given to a group of
people who want to work on OS level threads.  There is already a patch
available from someone on the list whose name I can't remember, that
would serve as a useful starting point.  Then when the changes are
stable, we can merge the branch back into the main line.

-russ


--
The train to Success makes many stops in the state of Failure.