File: libtool.info,  Node: Thread Safety in libltdl,  Next: User defined module data,  Prev: Modules for libltdl,  Up: Using libltdl

11.3 Using libltdl in a multi threaded environment
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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.