Warning: This is the manual of the legacy Guile 2.2 series. You may want to read the manual of the current stable series instead.
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It is traditional in Scheme to implement exception systems using
call-with-current-continuation. Continuations
(see Continuations) are such a powerful concept that any other
control mechanism — including catch and throw — can be
implemented in terms of them.
Guile does not implement catch and throw like this,
though. Why not? Because Guile is specifically designed to be easy to
integrate with applications written in C. In a mixed Scheme/C
environment, the concept of continuation must logically include
“what happens next” in the C parts of the application as well as the
Scheme parts, and it turns out that the only reasonable way of
implementing continuations like this is to save and restore the complete
C stack.
So Guile’s implementation of call-with-current-continuation is a
stack copying one. This allows it to interact well with ordinary C
code, but means that creating and calling a continuation is slowed down
by the time that it takes to copy the C stack.
The more targeted mechanism provided by catch and throw
does not need to save and restore the C stack because the throw
always jumps to a location higher up the stack of the code that executes
the throw. Therefore Guile implements the catch and
throw primitives independently of
call-with-current-continuation, in a way that takes advantage of
this upwards only nature of exceptions.