Re: Ada BIND was: Improving Ada's image - Was: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics

[Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>]

>>>>> "Hyman" == Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> writes:

    Hyman> It's not unknown for this to happen when a buggy X Windows
    Hyman> program grabs the server and never lets go, and that's on a
    Hyman> proper multitasking system.

Even in this case, the web server, for example, continues to run just
fine (unless it is incredibly dodgy and requires X...).

Also, when it does happen, it is easy for an experienced user to
resolve by logging into the system via some other means (eg. text
console) and kill the offending process.

If on the other hand a buggy Windows application doesn't give up CPU
control when using co-oporative multitasking, rebooting is the only
option.

It is still possible for a single application to cause other
applications to hang, just not as easy to do accidently, by denial of
service attacks (depending on ulimits under Unix). Eg. by hogging all
available diskspace, or allocating all RAM, or spawning infinity
processes, flooding the network, etc. Eventually other processes will
no longer work as required.

All of this seems irrelevant to Ada though, I don't think that there
is anything unique to Ada which would solve any of these issues.
-- 
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>