On the topic of asyncs and utility as an extension language

[dskr]

Hi,

In an earlier message today, I mentioned my use of guile as an  
extension language. There is one new barrier to use of guile as an  
extension language that exists in guile 1.8 that did not exist in  
guile 1.6.

The new async mechanism works via a pipe. The natural thing,  
remanufacturing the pipe, does not happen on
a call to primitive-fork. I'm of the view that an angel gets its wings  
each time I call fork and so my codes do this with reckless abandon.

Why fork? Lots of reasons... I use it so that I can mmap enormous  
files read-write with MAP_PRIVATE and fork new processes that mark up  
their now private copy. It is tremendously efficient for many  
applications.

I understand that the work to patch up the pipes may not be worthwhile  
in applications that are about to call exec, but this could be  
remedied easily by providing the expected primitive-vfork for this  
purpose.

Cheers,
        Dan Ridge