I believe Stelian introduced that hack for the sake of CLOSE-FOREIGN-LIBRARY. Can we keep track of handles in a smarter way? (Not all Lisps expose the dlopen() handle IIRC.) Or perhaps CLOSE-FOREIGN-LIBRARY could call dlclose() repeatedly? Subject to an option, perhaps. (Does it return nonzero if the library was already unloaded?)

Stelian, what was your use case?

On Mon, 16 May 2022 at 10:47, Madhu enometh@meer.net wrote:

LOAD-FOREIGN-LIBRARY and USE-FOREIGN-LIBRARY have the undesirable side-effect of closing the library first before loading it. While unloading doesn't seem to work on ccl, on Lispworks, mkcl and ecl this actually does what is intended, but it has unfortunate consequences with some libraries which perform initializations which are not undone when they are unloaded. reloading the library is disastrous.

the names LOAD-FOREIGN and USE-FOREIGN have nothing to suggest there is unloading involved. The expectation is that unloaded libraries are loaded. If a library is already loaded there is no expectation that it will be touched. This is the desired behaviour.

In my case I have been bitten by USE-FOREIGN-LIBRARY and I changed it to not unload with the following patch. Can anyone suggest anything better?

[Please don;t ask me to open a github issue, I've tried using the github channels since 2019 absolutely no success]