Show HN: A dynamic C (Hot reloading) module-based Web Framework

Cool! Looks like is used dynamic loading. Which is certainly workable. One downside is that while dynamic loading is well-supported, dynamic unloading is generally not. Meaning if you are using dynamic loading and re-loading for hot updates the server process will start to accumulate memory. Not a huge issue of the server process is periodically restarted, but can potentially cause weird bugs.

You might be able to make something more robust by forking and loading the modules in a separate process. Then do something fancy with shared memory between the main process and the module processes. But I haven’t looked into this much

Doesn't dlclose unload things...?

> If the reference count drops to zero and no other loaded libraries use symbols in it, then the dynamic library is unloaded.

It's implementation defined. The dlclose may be a noop and that's fine as far as POSIX is concerned.

So generally you have no guarantee if your libc actually unmaps the shared object, due to various reasons. There are ways to get it to unload, but that entails digging around platform specific dlopen flags and ensuring symbols in your shared object doesn't use certain load types (unique/nodelete). Thread local storage/destructors also further complicate things.

Some libcs like musl dlclose don't do anything for example and just leave things to be unloaded on program exit.

Look at musl, dlclose marks a library as invalid, so when reallocations happened next the pointers get reused. It's garbage collected, but things get unloaded.

Though, you do seem to be correct that POSIX allows things to remain in the address space:

> The use of dlclose() reflects a statement of intent on the part of the process, but does not create any requirement upon the implementation, such as removal of the code or symbols referenced by handle. Once an object has been closed using dlclose() an application should assume that its symbols are no longer available to dlsym(). All objects loaded automatically as a result of invoking dlopen() on the referenced object shall also be closed if this is the last reference to it.

> Although a dlclose() operation is not required to remove structures from an address space, neither is an implementation prohibited from doing so. The only restriction on such a removal is that no object shall be removed to which references have been relocated, until or unless all such references are removed. For instance, an object that had been loaded with a dlopen() operation specifying the RTLD_GLOBAL flag might provide a target for dynamic relocations performed in the processing of other objects-in such environments, an application may assume that no relocation, once made, shall be undone or remade unless the object requiring the relocation has itself been removed. [0]

[0] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696799/functions/dl...