5.2.1 Guile Initialization Functions

To initialize Guile, you can use one of several functions. The first, scm_with_guile, is the most portable way to initialize Guile. It will initialize Guile when necessary and then call a function that you can specify. Multiple threads can call scm_with_guile concurrently and it can also be called more than once in a given thread. The global state of Guile will survive from one call of scm_with_guile to the next. Your function is called from within scm_with_guile since the garbage collector of Guile needs to know where the stack of each thread is.

A second function, scm_init_guile, initializes Guile for the current thread. When it returns, you can use the Guile API in the current thread. This function employs some non-portable magic to learn about stack bounds and might thus not be available on all platforms.

One common way to use Guile is to write a set of C functions which perform some useful task, make them callable from Scheme, and then link the program with Guile. This yields a Scheme interpreter just like guile, but augmented with extra functions for some specific application — a special-purpose scripting language.

In this situation, the application should probably process its command-line arguments in the same manner as the stock Guile interpreter. To make that straightforward, Guile provides the scm_boot_guile and scm_shell function.

For more about these functions, see Initialization.