On Sep 2, 2009, at 1:26 PM, Sidney San Martín wrote:
It's well-established that some tasks, like deallocating memory, are
totally unnecessary before your application exits, but others, like
calling asl_close() if you've called asl_open() earlier, are less
established.

With the advent of sudden termination, knowing what needs to be done
before exiting or being SIGKILLed, and what constitutes clean or dirty
state, has become even more important.

What should I be concerned about?

Unsaved user state.

That is about it.

The system should otherwise be hardened against spontaneous termination of processes. To not be invites DoS attacks, at the least, or opens security holes, at the worst.

What Sudden Termination drives home, though, is that sudden termination is something all processes should have always supported; many a user is all about force quit or hold down the power off button to shut down the machine. Scary, but true.

There isn't much you can do about document data in a non-autosaving environment, but there is more user state that is often not persisted until termination to think about. User defaults, for example. If you have a default that has changed, consider forcing it to be persisted more often than just termination. Certainly, you'll want to do so if you want to fully embrace sudden termination.

b.bum


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