Re: [MIT-Scheme-devel] primitives, interrupts, allocation, and robustness

[Arthur A. Gleckler]

(a) If a primitive performs a permanent side effect, it may not use
any system call afterward that could ever conceivably block.  This
means eliminating (or at least deprecating) complex primitives such as
FILE-TOUCH and replacing them by Scheme code.

This is my favorite suggestion.  I've always wanted to eliminate, or at least minimize, the microcode primitives layer.  Sometimes they're needed, but I'd prefer either to eliminate C code or to talk with it at arm's length, e.g. via an inter-thread or inter-process mailbox mechanism, when it isn't absolutely necessary to have it linked in for performance.

Thanks for the detailed analysis, by the way.