[PATCH] [RFC] fixes for guile-1.8

[Bill Nottingham]

Derek Atkins (warlord at MIT.EDU) said: 
> >engine-helpers.c: scm_block_gc no longer exists in guile-1.8.
> >
> >The engine-helpers.c probably needs wrapped in a version-check, which
> >is why this is a RFC...
> 
> Yeah, this is a bit more of a problem.  This particular operation can
> really beat on the guile garbage collector.  Does guile 1.8 have some
> API we could use to manually turn the garbage collection on and off?
> With the GC on it's a huge performance hit during these particular 
> operations.
> So I'd really prefer not to just outright remove this if we can find
> some other way to do what we want.

In the NEWS file of guile-1.8.0:

....
** The GC can no longer be blocked.

The global flags scm_gc_heap_lock and scm_block_gc have been removed.
The GC can now run (partially) concurrently with other code and thus
blocking it is not well defined.

....

So, I'd read that as 'no'. (I'm in no way an expert on guile internals.)

Bill