Re: terminate applications

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

I think the answer is to have a standard library of stuff that provides 
connections to common OS operations. Most OS's support some kind of 
process kill capability - we just need a standard interface to it. In 
"normal" conditions, you use the Ada task abortion. When you need some 
specialized OS capability (such as killing without concern for cleanup, 
etc.) you connect to the OS in a standard way and let it do the wet-work 
for you.

C saw a need to connect to the OS - it *is* the OS in many cases - so it 
has lots of nice, convenient, reasonably portable hooks for doing OS 
operations. Ada could do the same. Problem solved. :-)

MDC


Robert I. Eachus wrote:
> 
> The other problem, of aborting a task that is waiting IN the OS has to 
> be an implementation defined thing.  But it shouldn't be too hard to 
> talk your vendor in to checking whether a task that is being aborted is 
> waiting in an OS call and doing whatever OS specific thing is required 
> to get out there.  Especially where Ada tasks correspond to OS threads, 
> that shouldn't be too hard.  You don't care why that (abort protected) 
> thread is not in a ready state in the OS, you want to kill any such 
> threads.  (Since making a blocking call from an abort protected region 
> is a bounded error, I don't think any langauge changes are required for 
> this.)
> 


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Marin David Condic
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