Is there an mechanism or trick to run a function when a program loads?
What I'm trying to achieve...
void foo(void)
{
}
register_function(foo);
but obviously register_function won't run.
so a trick in C++ is to use initialization to make a function run
something like
int throwaway = register_function(foo);
but that doesn't work in C. So I'm looking for a way around this using standard C (nothing platform / compiler specific )
If you are using GCC, you can do this with a constructor
function attribute, eg:
#include <stdio.h>
void foo() __attribute__((constructor));
void foo() {
printf("Hello, world!\n");
}
int main() { return 0; }
There is no portable way to do this in C, however.
If you don't mind messing with your build system, though, you have more options. For example, you can:
#define CONSTRUCTOR_METHOD(methodname) /* null definition */
CONSTRUCTOR_METHOD(foo)
Now write a build script to search for instances of CONSTRUCTOR_METHOD, and paste a sequence of calls to them into a function in a generated .c file. Invoke the generated function at the start of main()
.
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