Re: GModule unloading

[Michael Ekstrand <mekstran scl ameslab gov>]

On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 10:18 -0500, Matt Hoosier wrote:
> On 5/23/07, Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 09:33 -0500, Matt Hoosier wrote:
> > > What happens when the GModule is unloaded? Does libboo also get
> dumped
> > > because the application itself doesn't directly link against
> > > liboo.so.0.1.2, or does it stay resident forever?
> >
> > its a reasonable question. a prior question, however: why are you
> > worrying about this?
> 
> I'm working on an embedded system for which the startup time of Gtk is
> deemed unacceptable for launching auxiliary programs. I was thinking
> about using GModules in a way similar to what the maemo-launcher does:
> call some psdueo_main() function to instantiate the toplevel window of
> each auxiliary "program," then just do a gtk_widget_show() on the
> returned UI control.
> 
> Often these things will link against shared libraries which the main
> shell application itself doesn't. So I'm concerned about whether the
> main UI is going to crash when some GType registered during the
> lifetime of a module, is made invalid.

Yeah, it'll crash as soon as anything tries to access the type info.

Idea: can you fork(), and then load the module in a separate process?
The load vs. exec will prevent the load cost of GTK+, but the fork will
let you have each app in its own address space.  Closing can be
terminating the process rather than unloading a module, so you don't
have to worry about any of this.

- Michael