For sure, Sid's example is very helpful with that. And I think you're right that file_load is likely to be thread safe, but I'd like to be sure. Using file_load would do away with the mallocs, fopen, fread, fclose, rewind, and anything else that needs stdio, making an own implementation even more trivial

With "inspiration" from Sid's example, this is small enough that it's the kind of thing I'd like to write my own implementation for use in my own future projects.

I guess now that it's the weekend we won't hear more from jcl on this matter until Monday, if ever. My second request was never addressed, and I'd really like to know more about the thread-safety of GS functions -- this'd be very useful to have in the manual. Maybe it'd be even easier to just list the functions that aren't thread-safe, but I don't know.

Jibb