On Mar 11, 2009, at 5:58 AM, Gregor Goldbach wrote:
Hi everyone,
I understand initialization of an XS module may be modified using
BOOT.
However, there seems to be no counterpart of BOOT. How do I e.g. free
memory I allocated in BOOT?
Is it okay to call call_atexit() for this purpose? DynaLoader does
it...
If I may use this function, why isn't it documented in perlapi? ;)
Or is the current practice to write an XS function that e.g. frees the
memory allocate at BOOT and call it in an END handler in the module's
Perl code?
Sorry if this is a FAQ but I couldn't find anything in the docs
about it...
It depends, really.
If your BOOT code creates perl objects that need to be cleaned up, or
hangs on to anything that depends on perl objects, then atexit() is
too late. atexit() handlers get called after main() returns, and by
that time, the interpreter has already shut down.
If all you need to do is clean up stuff you malloc'd, or sockets or
files or shm or whatever you created from C, then atexit() should be
fine.
An END block would be a cleaner, more general solution, IMO, because
you don't have to worry about your C teardown eventually trying to
call back into a dead interpreter.
--
So this new album took us quite a while, to get it together, to find a
title and things like that - and we were travelling quite a bit - we
made a few sort of gestures in the East, and a few gestures in the
West, and then we got thrown out because of our gestures - this is
something that we decided was an apt title for a thing that's called
'The Song Remains The Same'.
-- Robert Plant, rambling to introduce a song
