Re: stupid question: how can I finish a program?

[Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>]

Robert A Duff fed this fish to the penguins on Wednesday 28 August 2002 
03:22 pm:

> Darren New <dnew@san.rr.com> writes:
> 
>> Other OSes (like Amiga's OS) specifically don't clean up anything at
>> all, as this lets you do things like allocate memory, load a program
>> into it, and start it up and then exit yourself. You have to clean it
>> up for yourself.
> 
> I don't know Amiga, but it seems to me that if a crashed program
> causes memory leaks, the OS is broken.
>
        The described behavior is closer to a VMS spawn (or fork() call). 
Essentially the initial program has done the memory allocation/image 
load, after which the new process is totally independent (hence 
responsible for it's own process termination cleanup).

        One caveat, the Amiga OS did not natively handle virtual/protected 
memory -- it used a single global address space (it ran on 68000 
processors). There were modules to make use of virtual addressing on 
later processors, but still no protected memory. OTOH, we are talking a 
system with a multi-priority round-robin preemptive task scheduler that 
ran off 880K floppies with a graphical (the "text" interface required 
the graphical libraries just to render text) interface in 256K RAM -- 
this, when M$ Windows was around the 3.0 (or earlier) where the window 
manager handled task swapping on top of a non-multitasked base.
 
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