5.1 Linking Programs With Guile

This section covers the mechanics of linking your program with Guile on a typical POSIX system.

The header file <libguile.h> provides declarations for all of Guile’s functions and constants. You should #include it at the head of any C source file that uses identifiers described in this manual. Once you’ve compiled your source files, you need to link them against the Guile object code library, libguile.

<libguile.h> is not in the default search path for headers, because Guile supports parallel installation of multiple versions of Guile, with each version’s headers under their own directories. This is to allow development against, say, both Guile 2.0 and 2.2.

To compile code that includes <libguile.h>, or links to libguile, you need to select the effective version you are interested in, and then ask pkg-config for the compilation flags or linking instructions. For effective version 2.0, for example, you would invoke pkg-config --cflags --libs guile-2.0 to get the compilation and linking flags necessary to link to version 2.0 of Guile. You would typically run pkg-config during the configuration phase of your program and use the obtained information in the Makefile.

See the pkg-config man page, for more information.