Re: reentrantcy?

[Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl>]

On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 07:03:19PM -0600, Paul Elliott wrote:
> Is there any requirement that a shared library be reentrant, if the upstream 
> wrote it that way?

I guess you mean thread-safety rather than reentrancy.

It's not reasonable to expect code with any shared data to be reentrant --
even basic building blocks like malloc() are not.

On the other hand, if a library is not thread safe, I think this deserves a
warning in the man page (unless thread safety would make no sense for that
particular use).

If the library has an actual reason to use globals -- with such a warning,
being not thread safe is not a big flaw, and it can often be more efficient
since the caller knows when the library will never be called concurrently --
which is the case a good majority of the time.

-- 
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