[petsc-dev] circular dependencies SLEPc

[Jed Brown]

"Smith, Barry F." <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

>> There is some nontrivial infrastructure that would be needed for this
>> model.
>> 
>> 1. This new component needs to be built into a new library such as
>>   libpetsc-plugin.a (when static).
>> 
>> 2. Users need to know when they should link this module.  They'll need a
>>   link line something like -lpetsc-plugin -lslepc -lpetsc in this case.
>>   It would need to be specified correctly in makefiles and pkg-config.
>> 
>> 3. Anything with __attribute__((constructor)) runs *before* main, thus
>>   before PetscInitialize.  There would need to be a new mechanism to
>>   register a callback to be run at the end of PetscInitialize.
>
>    Are you saying we need something like PetscPlugInRegister(PetscErrorCode (*)(void)) that can be called before PetscInitialize() by plugin libraries that 
> registers the function that PetscInitialize() than calls? This is doable, just needs to use malloc() directly and cannot use PETSc's FList constructs.

Yes, either with malloc or some fixed (fairly large) number of slots.
If using malloc, you'd want an __attribute__((destructor)) that runs
after main to free the list.  (You can't free it in PetscFinalize
because the user could call PetscInitialize again; you need to free it
to avoid Valgrind noise.)