Force hook exit

This is a simple module for Drupal 6 that does its best to guarantee that hook_exit() gets called, even if a module exits early with exit().

The reasoning behind this module is that lots of modules in Drupal 6 print output and then call exit(). This is commonly used to output JSON, for example. Usually that's fine, but calling exit() stops the regular request process. Depending what you're doing in your hook_exit() it may be important to ensure its execution, thus this module was created.

Installation

Just enable it. There's no configuration. Just turn it on and let it do its thing.

History

The literal use case that prompted me to create this was outputting a View as a JSON response while having the Autoload module enabled. Autoload creates a cache of all class locations and sets the cache on hook_exit(). Since I was calling exit from my page callback, the cache was never getting set, meaning Autoload was doing a database query for every class used in the View.

I know that the cache will eventually be built as the rest of the site gets loaded normally, but it got me thinking, and now there's a new module in the world. I also realize that I could have simply invoked hook_exit() myself, but what about the billion other modules that don't bother to do this? I could go around and patch each and every one of them, or...