I've rewritten the RTL so Felix dynamic libs and their instances are now garbage collected. A library instance is the library together with a thread frame object (global store). The instance is actually only needed transiently if at all, since any running procedure using the thread frame refers to it: hanging on the thread frame via the instance is probably an issue, however in general a library such as a plugin can have other entry points, and these are coupled with the instance.
Anyhow, with the new method, libraries do NOT get unloaded when there are no references to them because this is entirely unsafe in C++ and very nasty to manage in C. Bad languages lead to nasty problems. Any pointer into the library such as a vtable pointer or C string requires the code remain resident and there's no reliable way to track this. However there's a new problem created by this: the objects holding the library and instance are not themselves tracked. These are the very top level objects, the felix "world" objects. This is fine if they're on the stack, since the stack is scanned conservatively, provided the threads base stack pointer is obtained before creating the world object. however if these objects get heaped .. they will have to be garbage collected too. Since the whole idea is to get rid of the need to root and unroot the instances, since unrooting them requires action under program control which is hard to do. I may have to actually "destroy" thread frames in instances artificially by nulling out the pointers since the whole idea of an instance is to exist even when the libraries entry points are not active, for example entry points could be executed by callbacks from foreign event loops. -- john skaller skal...@users.sourceforge.net http://felix-lang.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Put Bad Developers to Shame Dominate Development with Jenkins Continuous Integration Continuously Automate Build, Test & Deployment Start a new project now. Try Jenkins in the cloud. http://p.sf.net/sfu/13600_Cloudbees _______________________________________________ Felix-language mailing list Felix-language@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/felix-language
