Re: Hack the (init) system!

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Ludovic Courtès writes:

>> So, I think we have two choices:
>>
>> 1. Avoid threads in dmd, i.e. either refrain from adding this REPL
>>    server feature, or re-implement it in a way that avoids threads.
>>
>> 2. Avoid 'primitive-fork' in dmd, which means reimplementing
>>    'fork+exec-command' in C; reimplementing the code where we currently
>>    use 'primitive-fork' within various guix service definitions; and
>>    documenting that users should never use 'primitive-fork' in their
>>    services.  If we choose this route, we should probably disable
>>    'primitive-fork' somehow, or at least have it issue a stern warning.
>>
>> I don't think that we should add a set of features to dmd that will make
>> it fundamentally unreliable in a way that cannot be fixed.
>>
>> What do you think?
>
> Agreed, of course.  I think #1 is the way to go.
>
> Thanks,
> Ludo’.

I wonder if it's about time that Guile get something along the lines of
a well-supported, general event loop system?  There's value in having a
mainline way to do it; Python has AsyncIO which is gaining a lot of
traction... the main advantage being that having an officially supported
cooperative event loop (and as a bonus, an official way of working with
it nicely with coroutines) permits writing a lot of code in a
non-blocking way that's compatible... you can use this non-blocking
database wrapper with that non-blocking websocket implementation, for
example.

This is pretty off-topic from Guix though I guess... maybe it's a
conversation for guile-user, or guile-devel.  But I'm curious if others
have been thinking along these lines.

 - Chris