Re: srfi-18 requirements

[Julian Graham]

>  Agreed, that's a nice solution.  The matter of whether a mutex can be
>  unlocked by another thread will depend on an application's design for
>  how it uses that mutex, and it feels right for the application to
>  declare this when the mutex is created, instead of on every unlock
>  call.
>
>  On the Scheme level, I think the call can still be `make-mutex', with
>  optional flag args - is that right?

Yes.  For C, though, how do you want to manage passing these flags?  I
imagine the primitive should be named something like
scm_make_mutex_with_options (or _with_flags), and we could either
require two arguments (each being a symbol option as described below
or SCM_UNDEFINED) or have it take a list containing an arbitrary
number of symbol options to allow us to extend its behavior as
necessary.  I didn't get a strong sense of established precedent
looking at Guile's C API; I'm kind of leaning towards the list
approach right now.


>  > Actually, I just remembered a fairly elegant approach that seems to be
>  > used in other parts of the Guile API -- these optional arguments could
>  > be specified as symbols: 'unlock-if-unowned and
>  > 'unlock-if-owned-by-other, say.  Let me know what you'd prefer.
>
>  This is still an interesting question, but now for `make-mutex'
>  instead of for `unlock-mutex'.  Personally I like the symbol approach,
>  because (in comparison with a sequence of #t and #f) it will make the
>  code easier to understand at the point of the call, and also because
>  the #t/#f approach requires remembering the parameter ordering.

Cool -- I'll set up make-mutex for Scheme, and for C as described
above.  Let me know if that's not okay.


Regards,
Julian