The trouble of separate module atexit-stacks
Using atexit() to specify functions to be called if an application terminates is quite common practice. This is especially true for libraries since the C-standard specified atexit()-function is a way for the library to register its cleanup logic without relying on the 3rd-party application to properly call a specific cleanup function.
This is also what the library the author was working with did. Since the usage of the atexit()-function is nothing uncommon, it was quite surprising to observe that obviously the cleanup handling (which got registered via the atexit()-function) occurred after some resources were already freed when compiling the code with Microsoft’s Universal C runtime. In this particular case, this fact resulted in the cleanup function being stuck in an endless loop with the result of the app never terminating.
To understand the root cause of the problem, let’s first take a look at a simple case of using an atexit()-registered function to stop a thread and wait until the thread terminated before the hosting application closes cleanly:
