Re: Hack the (init) system!

[Thompson, David]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 5:13 AM, Andy Wingo <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Fri 25 Sep 2015 23:04, Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> I wonder if it's about time that Guile get something along the lines of
>> a well-supported, general event loop system?
>
> I think Guile needs user-space threads, implemented on top of delimited
> continuations.  With threads, you don't need to invert control in your
> program.  Racket takes this approach as well.
>
> To get there we need to expose port buffers to Scheme, mark all file
> descriptors as nonblocking, and cause EWOULDBLOCK to suspend the current
> green thread.  I had a prototype working a while back on the
> wip-ethreads branch, but you don't want to introduce a separate port
> type -- really you want to have this work on all ports, so that's the
> hacking that's needed.

"Green threads" and "user-space threads" are coroutines, yes?  That
would be a very nice feature.

> I'll try to get out a 2.2 prerelease in the next week or so --
> everything is up to date now, finally, I just have a pending patch to
> make the stack grow down instead of up so we can use native CALL
> instructions in some future.  Works in progress...

Exciting! :)

- Dave