Re: Passing objects between threads

[Chris Vine]

On Sat, 10 Sep 2016 22:16:22 +0200
Panicz Maciej Godek <address@hidden> wrote:
> I agree, it is a simple concept, and easily implementable using
> condition variables. However, it would probably be nicer if guile
> provided some standard solution, instead of forcing every programmer
> to coming up with their own ones.
> 
> I've noticed that there's a module (ice-9 occam-channel) bundled with
> Guile, but unfortunately it is undocumented.
> 
> Maybe it is a problem with the Guile community that -- despite some
> attempts like Guildhall -- we didn't manage to create anything like
> CPAN or pip. (I think that the Chicken community was more successful
> in that regard)

Unnecessary and overly complex abstractions are undesirable when
dealing with native threads, because to use threads safely you need to
know what the implementation is doing behind your back.  (And I would
say they are undesirable in other cases as well, but not everyone may
agree with that.)

Some thread abstractions I like - I think Go channels are quite a nice
light weight wrapper over thread-safe and type-safe queues.  Generally
though I don't mind guile's lack of support for this given that it is
so simple to do yourself.

On your last point, I think by and large that guile has been reasonably
successful in its ecosystem.  There is a large set of libraries and
scheme extensions that come with guile out of the box, and plenty of
third party libraries on github and similar sites as well.  I also want
to inspect code I put on my system - if I do not know of the author and
trust her code, I definitely want to look at the code first, not just
install it over the internet.

I am not sure that internet distribution sites of the kind you mention
are particularly helpful unless they are curated, and there isn't
usually the manpower to do that for open source code.  Perl has waned
considerably notwithstanding CPAN.  (I am also suspicious of sites
which advertise themselves as: "A guild is an association of
independent craftspeople.  A guildhall is where they meet.  This
Guildhall aims to make a virtual space for Guile wizards and
journeyfolk to share code."  WTF.)

Chris