5.4 General concepts for using libguile

When you want to embed the Guile Scheme interpreter into your program or library, you need to link it against the ‘libguile’ library (see section Linking Programs With Guile). Once you have done this, your C code has access to a number of data types and functions that can be used to invoke the interpreter, or make new functions that you have written in C available to be called from Scheme code, among other things.

Scheme is different from C in a number of significant ways, and Guile tries to make the advantages of Scheme available to C as well. Thus, in addition to a Scheme interpreter, libguile also offers dynamic types, garbage collection, continuations, arithmetic on arbitrary sized numbers, and other things.

The two fundamental concepts are dynamic types and garbage collection. You need to understand how libguile offers them to C programs in order to use the rest of libguile. Also, the more general control flow of Scheme caused by continuations needs to be dealt with.

Running asynchronous signal handlers and multi-threading is known to C code already, but there are of course a few additional rules when using them together with libguile.

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