Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!cs.tcd.ie!vax1!rwallace
From: rwallace@vax1.tcd.ie
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Task KILL for Amiga
Message-ID: <31269@vax1.tcd.ie>
Date: 24 Jan 89 18:57:09 GMT
References: <3716@crash.cts.com> <10908@s.ms.uky.edu> <5713@cbmvax.UUCP> <10926@s.ms.uky.edu> <5748@cbmvax.UUCP>
Organization: Computer Laboratory, Trinity College Dublin
Lines: 28

In article <5748@cbmvax.UUCP>, jesup@cbmvax.UUCP (Randell Jesup) writes:
> In article <10926@s.ms.uky.edu> sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes:
>>Why? Seems to me that resource allocation is an infrequently done thing.
>>It also seems to me that resources could be tracked with bitmaps. Where
>>is the serious speed/memory degradation?
>>
>>Assuming I'm right, what's the REAL reason resources aren't tracked?
> 
> ...  Improperly written programs will
> leave the system potentially munged anyways, so cleaning up after them is
> very risky, at best (witness GOMF - sometimes saves you, but often doesn't, or
> you die a short time later).

Precisely. There are two reasons for tracking allocated resources. One is so
that the programmer can write his code to just exit without bothering to free
resources. This isn't at all important - it's very little effort to do this,
it's much more efficient to have resources freed by code that knows in
advance what will have been allocated, and if the programmer is really that
bothered about the hassle he can just use malloc() and simila functions for
windows, files etc. which will do the job. The other reason is so you can
kill a task without losing anything. You can't do this properly without
hardware memory protection, otherwise there isn't much chance of the system
surviving intact anyway. Hopefully Kickstart 2.0 will support hardware memory
management and resource tracking...

"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem"
Russell Wallace, Trinity College, Dublin
rwallace@vax1.tcd.ie