Add a clean way to exit a process

[Leandro Lucarella]

Sean Kelly, el  1 de noviembre a las 12:23 me escribiste:
> I've thought about doing this before, but I haven't come up with a clean
> way to do it yet.  The problem with simply throwing an exception is that
> this would only work in the main thread.  To allow other threads to

Yes, I completely ignored MT programs because in that case is usually
a little more tricky to stop everithing in a general way. When you have MT
you're probably stucked with manual termination.

> terminate the process you'd have to forcibly terminate other threads,
> and then running dtors would result in undefined behavior.  I'd
> considered sending signals to all threads and having them all throw
> exceptions, but it's illegal to throw an exception from a signal hander,
> and Windows has poor signal support anyway.  Sadly, I don't know of
> a better solution than simply calling exit() right now.

I guess something can be hacked using pthread_cancel + pthread_cleanup,
but even if this would be possible I think it's too much complexity for
too little gain (and again, I don't know if Windows as a similar
mechanism).

Anyway, I think the common case for a clean exit() are small script-ish
programs (I came up with this problem porting a small Python script to D),
not big multi-threaded applications. Maybe we can have a simple limited
solution: just add this check to the exit() function in my patch:
assert (!thread_needLock());
or something similar that can tell us if there are any other threads
running.

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
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