configure option to link ikarus with libpthread

[Andreas Rottmann]

Altough Ikarus doesn't use POSIX threads (yet), it might make sense to provide a configure option to link it against libpthread; I ran across this issue while hacking on sbank, which makes use of dlopen from (ikarus foreign) to load third-party shared libraries into the Ikarus process.

These shared libraries may in turn be linked against libpthread, which is a problem on several platforms, as (I can't really verify this, because I have no access to a e.g. a *BSD) threaded code can only be loaded into programs that are linked against libpthread, either directly, or via some other library. I was pointed to this issue in http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563464, which includes some links that have more information on that behaviour (altough I couldn't find "proper" documentation for this issue).

This is apparenly not a problem on Linux, though even on Linux it leads to spurious GDB errors when doing a dlopen on a libpthread-linked library from Ikarus:

(gdb) r
Starting program: /home/rotty/.system/bin/ikarus
Ikarus Scheme version 0.0.3+ (revision 1695, build 2008-11-29, 64-bit)
Copyright (c) 2006-2008 Abdulaziz Ghuloum

> (import (ikarus foreign))
> (dlopen "libgthread-2.0.so.0")
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
Error while reading shared library symbols:
Cannot find new threads: generic error
Cannot find new threads: generic error
(gdb) c
>

[Abdulaziz Ghuloum (aghuloum)]

Do you only need to link it with pthread/gthread or would I need to do something more?

Wouldn't doing ./configure LDFLAGS="-lgthread" be sufficient?

[Andreas Rottmann (rotty)]

I think so, as -D_REENTRANT is probably not relevant, but I'm not exactly sure about this.

BTW, It would be "LDFLAGS=-lpthread", I just used libgthread in my example since it was the first library that uses libpthread I could think of.

[Abdulaziz Ghuloum (aghuloum)]

I made configure autodetect if libpthread is available in the system if so, it links ikarus against it. This should be what you want, right? (rev 1584)

Aziz,,,

[Andreas Rottmann (rotty)]

Abdulaziz Ghuloum <email address hidden> writes:

> I made configure autodetect if libpthread is available in the system if
> so, it links ikarus against it. This should be what you want, right?
> (rev 1584)
>
Yes, that should resolve this issue.