[erlang-questions] Unidirectional linking?

[Mazen Harake]

Why would someone "kill the parent"? Do you have processes which are
randomly choosing other processes to terminate? ;)

If your answer is "No" then I would suggest that you just kill the worker
processes that is taking to long, kill it in cold blood, imo.

There is no reason to think about too many "if"-scenarios when the scenarios
are too far fetched. Try the simple version first :)

otherwise you can either trap_exits or use monitors instead.

/M

On 25 May 2011 08:00, Igor Ribeiro Sucupira <igorrs@REDACTED> wrote:

> Suppose there is a heavy operation Op that in some cases takes so long
> to finish that the caller loses interest in the result and gives up.
>
> I want to perform that operation in a way that allows me to:
> 1) Interrupt its execution if it does not finish in N milliseconds.
> 2) Interrupt its execution if the calling process exits (here I'm
> already supposing Op has to be run in another Erlang process, due to
> goal 1).
>
> To implement that, it seems unidirectional linking would be needed. Is
> there another safe and convenient way to do it?
>
> The first idea I had was something like this:
>
> Parent = self(),
> Child = spawn_link(fun() -> Parent ! (catch Op) end),
> receive Result -> Result
> after N -> unlink(Child), exit(Child, timeout), timeout
> end.
>
> But, if Parent is killed by another process right after calling
> unlink, Child would be left executing.
> Another problem is that I don't want Parent to die if Child exits for
> non-timeout reasons (although it seems very unlikely in the code
> above, with the catch).
>
> I was now thinking of substituting unlink(Child) with
> process_flag(trap_exit, true) and then kill Child, receive its exit
> message, set trap_exit to false again (I'm assuming it was false), and
> finally check if there were other exit messages (suiciding if it was
> the case).
>
> But then the code would become too ugly, so I got lazy and decided to
> post to this list.  :-)
>
> What do you think?
>
> Thanks.
> Igor.
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