How NOT to write a shared library

[jespdj]

Alerting people to a potential problem is the best way to avoid it. There's an old saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That is the "solution".

Yes, but you should be alerting the author of PulseAudio, and why do you say that this is "not a bug"? Ofcourse it's a bug. And even if it isn't a real mistake in the code, then it's a design bug. It doesn't really matter if you want to call it a bug or not. It's a problem and the author of PulseAudio must be made aware of it.

Shared libraries must NEVER terminate an application. I'm a Java programmer and doing System.exit(...) (which kills the JVM and so terminates your application) in a library is a deadly sin - especially if you're writing a Java web application that's running in an application server. Doing a System.exit(...) would kill the whole app server.