glib

I often read source code of different projects. Especially when i use them often like glib. I realized that glib has a glib-init file and wondered because i never had to call any initialization. Therefore this must be called by another mechanism.

glib-init.c includes a header called gconstructor.h which i know already from another project: gnome-builder. The header got probably copied but both projects use this for the same purpose:

execute a function to initialize a library on library-loading.

This is a really nice feature, which is not documented in the c standard. It is an extension from C compilers. If we read up the documentation we get:

__attribute__((constructor))

The constructor attribute causes the function to be called automatically before execution enters main ().

The aforementioned header tries to comply to various compilers or at least sets a preprocessor value to inform the user about missing functionality for this constructor attribute. As mentioned in the header file:

#ifdef G_DEFINE_CONSTRUCTOR_NEEDS_PRAGMA
#pragma G_DEFINE_CONSTRUCTOR_PRAGMA_ARGS(my_constructor)
#endif
G_DEFINE_CONSTRUCTOR(my_constructor)
static void my_constructor(void) {
...
}

Example

To demonstrate this, i created a simple example application with a shared library. The library looks like:

#include "gconstructor.h"
 
G_DEFINE_CONSTRUCTOR (this_runs_before_main)
 
void
this_runs_before_main (void)
{
  printf ("%s\n", "Before main");
}
 
void
library_func (void)
{
  printf ("%s\n", "Library Func");
}

I annotated one function with a constructor attribute. The library_func is exposed via the corresponding headerfile. The executable looks like:

#include "library.h"
 
int
main (int   argc,
      char *argv[])
{
  printf ("%s\n", "Main");
 
  library_func ();
 
  return 0;
}

Not very surprising the output looks like

Before main
Main
Library Func