Simultaneous Guile users

[Eric Buddington <eric@sparrow.vgernet.net>]

Greetings from the Berkshires.

I believe that I am comfortably in over my head here, and sincerely
hope I don't try your patience...

I am writing a GIS (Geographical Information System), which is
essentially a specialized data storage/processing engine for lines,
areas, raster grids, etc. After spending many sleepless nights
dreaming of a client protocol for this monster, I just about wet
myself with joy when I realized that Guile has the potential to take
care of all of that for me (making a lot of code obsolete, but it's
worth it!)

I imagine having each client submit Scheme commands which would be
processed directly by Guile. Given SCM wrappers for the user-level
functions, this could be a powerful setup. In short, a fairly
straightforward use of Guile.

So, the questions:

1) Since guile doesn't like to be multi-threaded, it looks like all
scheme input will be processed in the same thread. Is there an obvious
way to keep different users in different namespaces, and to allow
access to different functions from different callers?

2) I've seen some system call interfaces, for filesystem access,
system info, etc. Some of these could easily be security holes. Is
there a way to disable these? I imagine my purposes would require only
math functions and ones defined in my code.

Eric