bug#59321: ice-9's open-input-pipe is unexpectedly slow on some systems

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Andrew Whatson <whatson@gmail.com> skribis:

> Forcibly closing file descriptors like this shouldn't be necessary if
> the application has properly opened descriptors with the FD_CLOEXEC
> flag.  It would be good to get input from some more experienced Guile
> hackers on the potential consequences of this change.

Libguile opens all its own file descriptors at O_CLOEXEC (one omission
was recently fixed in 0aa1a9976fc3c6af4d1087e59d728cb8fe7d369a) so it
may be possible to remove that FD-closing loop.  There’s still the
possibility that application bug unwillingly leaks FDs, but we could
consider it’s none of our business.

Thoughts?

Similarly, with commit a356ceebee000efe91a2a16dbcaa64d6c6a3a922, it’s
possible to pass ‘open-file’ a flag that corresponds to O_CLOEXEC, which
wasn’t possible before.  I’ve also been thinking that files opened with
‘call-with-*’ should be O_CLOEXEC.  That’d be an incompatible change
though, so maybe not something for 3.0.x.

Ludo’.