Releasing a Vulkan Loader library

Libraries that are loaded dynamically must be explicitly closed (released). To be able to use Vulkan in our application, we opened the Vulkan Loader (a vulkan-1.dll library on Windows, or libvulkan.so.1 library on Linux). So, before we can close the application, we should free it.

How to do it...

On the Windows operating system family:

1. Take the variable of type HMODULE named vulkan_library, in which the handle of a loaded Vulkan Loader was stored (refer to the Connecting with a Vulkan Loader library recipe).
2. Call FreeLibrary( vulkan_library ) and provide the vulkan_library variable in the only argument.
3. For safety reasons, assign the nullptr value to the vulkan_library variable.

On the Linux operating system family:

1. Take the variable of type void* named vulkan_library in which the handle of a loaded Vulkan Loader was stored (refer to Connecting with a Vulkan Loader library recipe).
2. Call dlclose( vulkan_library ), provide the vulkan_library variable in the only argument.
3. For safety reasons, assign the nullptr value to the vulkan_library variable.

How it works...

On the Windows operating system family, dynamic libraries are opened using the LoadLibrary() function. Such libraries must be closed (released) by calling the FreeLibrary() function to which the handle of a previously opened library must be provided.

On the Linux operating system family, dynamic libraries are opened using the dlopen() function. Such libraries must be closed (released) by calling the dlclose() function, to which the handle of a previously opened library must be provided:

#if defined _WIN32 
FreeLibrary( vulkan_library ); 
#elif defined __linux 
dlclose( vulkan_library ); 
#endif 
vulkan_library = nullptr;

See also

• The recipe Connecting with a Vulkan Loader library in this chapter