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From: glee@cognos.uucp (Godfrey Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: "kill"
Message-ID: <1395@tao.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 4-Sep-87 10:22:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: tao.1395
Posted: Fri Sep  4 10:22:35 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Sep-87 22:50:39 EDT
References: <1708@amiga.amiga.UUCP> <581@sugar.UUCP> <935@unicus.UUCP>
Reply-To: glee@tao.UUCP (Godfrey Lee)
Organization: Cognos Inc., Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 32

In article <935@unicus.UUCP> sat@unicus.UUCP (S.A. Thurlow) writes:

>Yeah, BUT AllocMem's, open windows, open devices, etc. are still not
>tracked.  You would need to redo the resource management routines so ALL
>memory and device allocations are tracked and can be undone by the "end
>task."  The OS really should do this to guarantee that kill will always
>have the same affect.

That last statement is so true that I don't know why we are wasting time
discussing ways to track/free resources by the programmer. Every other
O/S I have dealt with (including MSDOS!) tracks resources. This missing
functionality in Amiga/DOS stands out like a sore thumb when compared with
the rich functionalities like message passing, device/event driven etc...

Something like this might not sound like that big a deal, because the system
works without it, but it has far reaching effects in that programmers cannot
rely on the system to trap and protect the system from runaway programs, causing
guru (aka system crash really), making debugging harder, giving worse reputation
to commercial software, that due to the inevitable bug, trashes the Amiga where
on another system, might just abort the program.

Bottom line is that it makes the programmer's job harder, and makes the machine
look like a flake!

So lets end the discussion, and simply ask Commodore to raise the priority
of adding resource tracking to the top of the things-to-do list. I would even
ask them to consider that it is really a bug.

I would like to take an e-mail vote:

	"Do you want Commodore to add resource tracking into the next release of
	 the operating system, even to the exclusion of something else?"

Please answer only YES or NO, and please answer only via e-mail. I will tabulate
only those votes and post the result on the net.
-- 
Godfrey Lee                                      P.O. Box 9707
Cognos Incorporated                              3755 Riverside Dr.
VOICE:  (613) 738-1440   FAX: (613) 738-0002     Ottawa, Ontario
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