Equivalent to Python atexit functionality

[steveklabnik]

Issue by bmurphy1976
Tuesday Jan 21, 2014 at 01:54 GMT

For earlier discussion, see rust-lang/rust#11695

This issue was labelled with: in the Rust repository

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I can't always guarantee that users are going to properly use a library (calling init methods, cleanup methods, etc.).

Occasionally things die horribly and you want to provide stronger guarantees about when things fail.

Is there a way to hook up to an exit signal of sorts to execute code when a program exits regardless of the exit mechanism? Something like Python atexit?

[sfackler]

This currently exists as std::rt::at_exit: http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/rt/fn.at_exit.html

Though I believe the callbacks currently don't trigger due to some problems from runtime removal and I'm not sure if it'll be stable for 1.0.

[jrop]

@steveklabnik The link above to std::rt::at_exit is dead. Is there a modern alternative currently in existence for Rust 2018 edition? A colleague and I have run across the same need: we need to run some cleanup code when our (internal) library is not in use.

[RustyYato]

@jrop A quick search on crates.io shows

• graceful
• shutdown_hooks

But these are old, a more modern solution is ctor, you can use the #[dtor] attribute to hook into shutdown.