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From: Martin Harriss <martin@Princeton.EDU>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] Threadcreate() failure value?
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 15:58:55 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <438E128F.3080103@Princeton.EDU> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <ee9e417a0511301239g5dbd92ecj494a98943baa9416@mail.gmail.com>

>>what if your create failed due to some other process having the process
>>leak, and you'd like your process, which has done nothing wrong, to get
>>out of the mess cleanly?

One of the problems is that the program that finds itself unable to 
proceed for lack of resources may not be able to recover because it 
needs resources to run the recovery mechanism.

This was dicussed a long time ago wrt memory allocation for Modula 3. 
See, for example:

http://www.elegosoft.com/pm3/intro/questions/new.html

(I'm sure that somewhere I've seen a more basic description of why 
handling out-of-memory conditions is diffucult, but I can't find it 
right now.)

I'd be the first to admit that this is a somewhat different case because 
M3 relies heavily on dynamic memory allocation and garbage collection, 
but I think that in general terms the issues are the same.

Martin


      parent reply	other threads:[~2005-11-30 20:58 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 9+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2005-11-30 16:03 ISHWAR RATTAN
2005-11-30 18:31 ` Russ Cox
2005-11-30 19:02   ` ISHWAR RATTAN
2005-11-30 19:16     ` Russ Cox
2005-11-30 19:59       ` Ronald G Minnich
2005-11-30 20:39         ` Russ Cox
2005-11-30 20:43           ` Ronald G Minnich
2005-11-30 20:50             ` Russ Cox
2005-11-30 20:58           ` Martin Harriss [this message]

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