Mac Forum / Programming / Mac Programming / August 2005

I have a simple program composed of a main executable and a dynamic
library (built with -dynamic -dynamiclib).  The executable is _not_
linked with the library.  It calls dlopen() to open the dynamic lib,
calls dlsym() to obtain the address of a function, calls that function
and then calls dlclose().

The problem is that while dlopen() does load the library and call its
global constructors, dlclose() does NOT call the library's global
destructors.  This can be very clearly seen if I use the environment
variable DYLD_PRINT_INITIALIZERS=1 - it calls the initializer function
of the dynamic lib at the dlopen(), and it calls the termination
function only when it calls exit(), not when it calls dlclose().

Is there any way to make dlclose() behave as it does on other Unix
systems, such as Linux and Solaris?

Thanks for any information,
- Yuval