Re: [Caml-list] The best way to circumvent the lack of Thread.kill ?

[Jacques Garrigue <garrigue@math.nagoya-u.ac.jp>]

From: Julien Narboux <Julien.Narboux@inria.fr>

> >How about forking off the theorem prover as a separate process?  You
> >can communicate the result back to the main program using either a
> >status code or a pipe (depending on how complex the result structure
> >is).  The interrupt button just kills the forked process.
> >
> Yes, but the problem is that under the native windows port (see 
> http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual035.html) :
> 
> "kill, pause not implemented (no inter-process signals in Windows)"

The workaround I found a long time ago is to embed a thread in the
forked process that waits for "signals" on a pipe.

If you look at byterun/startup.c and byterun/win32.c you will
see that it is started when there is a CAMLSIGPIPE in the environment.
This is used by otherlibs/labltk/browser/shell.ml on windows.

This already works on any bytecode application.
For native code, you could just link that bit of C code, and start it
by hand.

Another way to do it, which is used by ocamlwin, is to send SIGINT
through then win32 function GenerateConsoleCtrlEvent. But this will
just interrupt, not kill. And I didn't know that function at that
time...

Jacques Garrigue