sharing global variable?

QNX DEVELOPERS General Programming
1

I have one shared library called data.so.
Also I have two seperate process(A & B) that links to this data.so
In this data.so, I made one global variable “Counter”.

But when processA and processB is linked to data.so it seems to get it’s own local copy of “Counter”. How can I make processA and processB to have identical copy of “Counter” variable in this case? So if ProcessA changes “Counter” processB can also see that change and vise versa.

Thanks

2

Only way I know is to create share memory.

Maybe thjere is a gcc extention to specify that a variable is “really shared” but I wouldn’t know about that.

3

I was hoping for a more simple solution, but I guess I could use shared memory.

Thanks

4

There are many sick & twisted things you could do, but what’s wrong with shared memory?

You can have data.so export a function called “foo *get_shared_foo_var()”, which would return a pointer to an object of type “foo”. Each process simply calls get_shared_foo_var() and they get a pointer to a shared variable of type foo (what could be simpler?).

Better yet, have foo be an opaque type, and have the shared library export a bunch of member access functions that work on foo…

5

opaque type, miam miam I love those. I’m using opaque type all over the place these days. I write of lot of library stuff, stuf that gets used by co-worker. Using opaque type makes my job so much easier. It prevent people from doing thing I didn’t expected them too. It also force everything to be defined and document. Lovely ;)

6

Now I’m intrigued, or maybe ignorant for not having written an shared libraries. So what is an “opaque” type?

7

Basicaly it’s a pointer to an internal structure, but you don’t make it public. Here is a pseudo code example of the user header file would contain:

typedef struct Foo_s *Foo_t;
#define ILLEGAL_FOO NULL
Foo_t OpenFoo(void); // on erreur this will return ILLEGAL_FOO
int CloseFoo( Foo_t );
int DoSomeWork( Foo_t );
int GetResult(Foo_t);

Foo_t is opaque because the user had no idea what it points to, what it contain. As a matter of fact the type of Foo_t is totaly irrelevant, could be an integer for all the user know. The user if force to go through functions to work with the pointer, much like a C++ class would do with it’s private data section. Everything has to go through a nice interface.

In the private header of the library I just include the public header and add this:

#include <foo.h>

struct Foo_s {
char *some_memory;
int some_counter;
int thread_id; // yep the CreateFoo will actually create a thread
};

Oh by the way apparently, user typedef should’t be suffix with _t as its reserved for compiler implementation. But old habit are hard to break.

8

Mario, ok so if I understand properly, there is no actual type “opaque”, but rather its a technique to hide the internal type?

9

Yeah I guess you could say that opaque type is just a fancy name for hiding internal stuff. Since C doesn`t have concept of private data I guess “opaque” was chosen to represent the concept ;-)

There is probably lots of way to implement opaqueness ;-)

10

Good~ perfect.
Thanks for the insight everyone. Can’t wait till I try it.