Mexjulia on Ubuntu

Offtopic
1

Hello,
Is there anybody around who could help to debug the following error:

ufechner@TUD277255:~/00Software/mexjulia$ matlab
fatal: error thrown and no exception handler available.
Base.InitError(mod=:Sys, error=ErrorException("could not load symbol "jl_array_cconvert_cstring":
/usr/local/MATLAB/R2016b/bin/glnxa64/MATLAB: undefined symbol: jl_array_cconvert_cstring"))
rec_backtrace at /home/ufechner/julia/src/stackwalk.c:84
record_backtrace at /home/ufechner/julia/src/task.c:232
jl_throw at /home/ufechner/julia/src/task.c:550
jl_errorf at /home/ufechner/julia/src/builtins.c:78
jl_dlerror at /home/ufechner/julia/src/dlload.c:69 [inlined]
jl_dlsym at /home/ufechner/julia/src/dlload.c:24

More details see:
https://github.com/twadleigh/mexjulia/issues/32

Beeing able to write Julia code that can be called from Matlab would help me a lot in cooperating with colleagues from the University.

Uwe

2

According to c++ - typeinfo, shared libraries and dlopen() without RTLD_GLOBAL - Stack Overflow matlab does not use RTLD_GLOBAL.

3

Hello,
I do not really understand, how your answer relates to my question. I am not using RTLD_GLOBAL. I want to rephrase my question:

  • I am trying to call Julia from Matlab on Ubuntu;
  • this crashes Matlab with the error message “undefined symbol: jl_array_cconvert_cstring”;
  • as far as I understand, it works fine on Mac and Windows.
    What I do NOT understand:
  • why should the version of the C++ standard library that is linked to Matlab/ Julia should create any problem? If a pure C function interface is used, this should not matter.
    Does anybody understand, what could be the reason for this problem?
    Any comments welcome.
    Uwe
4

And neither is matlab, which is the issue, since julia cannot use dlsym to find the symbol.

C++ stdlib is irrelevant.

5

Why is this not a problem on Windows/ Mac then?

6

Dynamic loading is highly platform dependent. RTLD_LOCAL may not exist or MATLAB may not be using it for whatever reason

7

This sounds more like Voodoo than like science. There must be a clean way to embed Julia into other languages.

8

Not sure what you are talking about. You need to make sure libjulia is dlopen’d with RTLD_GLOBAL since otherwise you’ll get the error you see. This is not a julia issue at all but a MATLAB issue. You need to figure out how to embed something into MATLAB cleanly.

9

Perhaps try this suggestion in the thread linked earlier?

It means to make this call: dlopen("[...]/libjulia", RTLD_GLOBAL) from the mexfile before doing anything else with libjulia.

Accurate, sadly: much of “keeping the lights on” in modern computer systems ends up as a fight against build systems and concepts like “symbol coalescing” and “side-by-side assemblies” and “duplicate typeinfo”.

https://twitter.com/bdash/status/769409852577677312

Not related to Julia (or even MATLAB, except acutely). We live in a fallen (digital) world, yet we struggle on.

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