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Re: Guile startup cleaned up a bit




On Sat, 3 Oct 1998, Jim Blandy wrote:

> ** The gh_enter function now takes care of loading the Guile startup files.
> gh_enter works by calling scm_boot_guile; see the remarks below.

This is okay, since gh_ is supposed to be a "high level" interface anyway.

> ** The function scm_boot_guile now takes care of loading the startup files.
> 
> Since Guile cannot operate properly until boot-9.scm is loaded, there
> is no reason to separate loading boot-9.scm from Guile's other
> initialization processes.

Except that it (currently) takes an eternity to load. Until the
initialization is blindingly fast, there should be an alternative of not
loading boot-9. For some stuff you just don't need a module system,
records or all that stuff.

My personal opinion about this init stuff, btw, is that boot-9 should be
in C. Of course it would be preferable if it were compiled by hobbit or
something, but failing that, it should be translated by hand..

> This job used to be done by scm_compile_shell_switches, which didn't
> make much sense; in particular, it meant that people using Guile for
> non-shell-like applications had to jump through hoops to get Guile
> initialized properly.

Yeah; scm_compile_shell_switches sounded like a purely functional
operation and the side effect of loading boot-9 wasn't very intuitive...


Lauri Alanko
la@iki.fi