> I'm experimenting with a new approach in guile-gtk, the Guile bindings
> to Gtk+ (and Gnome). There, *every* module is required to be a *.scm
> source file. Such a Scheme file might decide to load and merge
> compiled code from a shared library, with a call to
> `merge-compiled-code'. Like
>
> (define-module (gtk gdk)
> :use-module (gtk dynlink))
>
> (merge-compiled-code "sgtk_init_gtk_gdk_glue" "libguilegtk")
>
> The shared library "libguilegtk" is searched in the usual places that
> the runtime linker would try. In addition, the current implementation
> does some magic with installed libtool *.la files to get inter-library
> dependencies and versioning right. I expect to find this magic in dld
> in the future, or at least in the Guile core.
>
> [This also works when -lguilegtk has already been linked at compile
> time, regardless whether shared or static.]
It might be worth having all modules work this way (that is, external
module-description files); then one wouldn't need to do anything
special to convert random scheme files to modules. Maybe this isn't
necessary. I'm jst looking at Scheme48; they seem to have a good
thing going.
Andrew