Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!apple!usc!pollux.usc.edu!papa
From: papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: resource tracking
Message-ID: <23118@usc.edu>
Date: 27 Feb 90 18:36:44 GMT
References: <1165@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca> <5214@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Sender: news@usc.edu
Organization: Felsina Software, Los Angeles, CA
Lines: 19

In article <5214@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>(calmer) Or at least I'm not. The point is what the system sees. All that
>IPC makes resource tracking a harder problem than it is in UNIX. When a program
>exits, the system really has no way of knowing whether it can safely free
>any resources allocated by that program or not.

I am not sure that the problem lies in the fact that IPC is done with
messages or not.  Take another system, for example, MS-Windows DDE 
(Dynamic Data Exchange). There, messages are "global memory" ATOMS that
are passed around.  The DDE protocol states who can and who cannot free
these atom after they've been used, and the situation is always deterministic
(a message sender can tell the receiver to "free" the message after having
used it, or ACK it back for freeing by the sender). So, IMHO it is not
the "method" that might be faulty, but the implementation.

-- Marco
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Xerox sues somebody for copying?" -- David Letterman
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=