In Terminix I’m making some improvements to how I’m handling the command-line by moving away from D’s getopts to the GTK method of dealing with it. The primary driver for this is to get the command line sent from the local application to the primary one. To do this, I registered my Options via setMainOptions, added a handler to addOnCommandLine and included the flag HANDLES_COMMAND_LINE when creating the application.

It all worked swimmingly except for one issue, while the primary got the command line just fine, the local instance would just hang and never return. After scratching my head for a bit and asking on the GTK IRC channel, a pointer to a C example gave me the nudge I needed. Looking more closely at the documentation for ApplicationCommandLine, I see this line:

For the case of a remote invocation, the remote process will typically exit when the last reference is dropped on @cmdline.

The issue here is that since D is GC’ed, the ApplicationCommandLine doesn’t get collected in a deterministic fashion. The solution was quite easy, simply destroy it at the end via a scope(exit) block. I’m going to file an issue with GtkD to see if this shouldn’t be made a Scoped reference.