Martin v. Löwis <mar...@v.loewis.de> added the comment: In principle, it should be possible (but perhaps not desirable, see below) to call FreeLibrary in a CDLL's __del__. However, since this would be a new feature, it can't go into 2.7. Patches are welcome; make sure to support both FreeLIbrary and dlclose.
There is a general issue with closing/freeing DLLs: if they are still referenced somewhere (e.g. in an atexit function, a C++ virtual method table, or on the call stack of another thread), then a later access to the code will crash the interpreter. In a typical DLL today (including all Python extension modules), the likelihood of crashes is close to 100%. For that reason, it's probably not a good idea to have ctypes auto-close DLLs; instead, it should be an opt-in mechanism. For most ctypes uses, closing is irrelevant, since people typically access system libraries that are independently loaded anyway, so closing them would not have any effect. ---------- nosy: +loewis _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue14597> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
