11.3 Using libltdl in a multi threaded environment

Libltdl provides a wrapper around whatever dynamic run-time object loading mechanisms are provided by the host system, many of which are themselves not thread safe. Consequently libltdl cannot itself be consistently thread safe.

If you wish to use libltdl in a multithreaded environment, then you must mutex lock around libltdl calls, since they may in turn be calling non-thread-safe system calls on some target hosts.

Some old releases of libtool provided a mutex locking API that was unusable with POSIX threads, so callers were forced to lock around all libltdl API calls anyway. That mutex locking API was next to useless, and is not present in current releases.

Some future release of libtool may provide a new POSIX thread compliant mutex locking API.

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