On 9/15/2015 1:40 PM, Daniel Stenberg wrote:
On Tue, 15 Sep 2015, David Chapman wrote:

  If you're using libcurl as a win32 DLL, you MUST use the
  CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION if you set this option or you will experience
  crashes.

Due to how ownership of that FILE pointer is handled.

I don't think the wording here is at all clear. Are you saying that when cURL is used as a Win32 DLL, fwrite is not a valid CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION even if passed in explicitly?

Hm, yes I guess that is the logical conclusion and it is a good question. I'm not sure, maybe our way of using it makes it different? The problem has something to do with the FILE * being owned by the application and it can't pass it on to the DLL to be accessed from there, but the flow isn't 100% clear to me.

Or are you saying that use of NULL as a CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION is not valid when cURL is used as a Win32 DLL, and that a pointer to fwrite must be passed in (or else the call should be skipped)?

The regular way we've phrased it, is that you need to implement a write callback. I'm not sure what happens if you just put fopen there.

All this is just info I've gathered and learned from other libcurl users, I am myself not an experienced wanderer in the world of Windows memory setups and concepts.

In either case, the documentation in the CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION page should have the same warning. You don't want pages to be inconsistent with each other.

Agreed!


To control what version of various libraries I am using in my application, I don't use DLLs (or .so files) and so I don't have direct experience with the problem at hand. However, your description led me to the following Microsoft Developer Network page, and I suspect it is the source of the DLL warning:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms235460.aspx

It says CRT (C runtime) objects are valid only for the copy of the CRT library where they are allocated or set. If the DLL uses a different copy of the CRT library than the application, then (for example) a file handle from the application cannot be used within the DLL. This can cause crashes if the application links to a DLL that was built elsewhere or at a different time.

This strongly suggests that if libcurl is linked to the application as a Win32 or Win64 DLL, cURL user code must provide a callback function - even if the only purpose of the callback is to call fwrite(). Can someone with more Windows DLL experience confirm this? That will help with clarification of the CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION and CURLOPT_WRITEDATA wording.

--
    David Chapman      [email protected]
    Chapman Consulting -- San Jose, CA
    Software Development Done Right.
    www.chapman-consulting-sj.com

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