Netscape's "favorite" tactic is scribbling over
itself in memory, at least on Windows. How do I
tell if a Mac app crash is due to the app overwriting
part of its main executable in RAM? At any rate,
especially after 20+ years, _I_ find it amazing
that programmers still haven't come up with a
99.999% perfect way of keeping applications from
doing this, no matter what OS or platform. :P
How hard can it be for the app to look around and
see that its current memory location starts at
_this_ address and ends at _that_ one, then create
a temporary file saying "Thou shall NOT write
ANYTHING upon thyself."???
I'm sick of seeing NETSCAPE.EXE caused a (pick an
error) in NETSCAPE.EXE. Bleagh. I suppose I'd
need a debugger loaded to catch Mac apps blowing
their own bits out?
All systems can do with these bad app-les is to
quarrantine them and sweep up the debris. Win NT/2K,
OSX, Linux etc can do that. Mac System/OS 9.1 and
older and WinMe/9x/3.xx can't. Its still best to
reboot after an app crashes, no telling what little
"nuggets" its left behind just waiting to cause
some normally stable app to blow up.
--- James S Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Part of the problem with Netscape 2.0 to 4.7x is
> that it was designed to be
> internally multithreaded, using a Netscape thread
> manager, rather than a
> system one*. The root of this came from Mac System 7
> and 16-bit Windows. Those
> systems didn't have thread managers. The result is a
> monstrously monolithic
> and huge application, which uses so many resources
> that it can block the
> system I/O queues, even on multithreaded,
> pre-emptive multitasking systems
> like OS/2 or Win9x (although perhaps not NT). The
> system has to be rebooted
> because you can't get back to the Finder/WorkPlace
> Shell/Explorer to kill it
> when it hangs.
>
> To their credit, this design provided some real
> benefits on a 68k Mac. I can
> be downloading something while sending an email or
> reading a web page, etc.
>
> *I think NS 4.x actually uses a system thread
> manager extension for OS 7.5.5
> and earlier.
=====
"The earth swarms with inhabitants. Why then should nature,
which is fruitful to an excess here, be so very barren in
the rest of the planets?" Bernard de Fontenelle, 1686
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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