Windows, io:fwrite, halt, buffer flushing problems, R10B-2

[Matthias Kretschmer]

Hello everyone

I encountered a little problem on Windows: I have code like the following:

-module(test).
-export([test/0]).
test() -> io:fwrite("test~n"), halt(1).

which behaves strangely: sometimes nothing is printed on screen. I 
assume it is some problem with flushing a buffer. Using init:stop/0 
instead of halt/1 solves the problem, but I wanted to return explicitly 
another error code than 0.

In the code I encountered this problem first, the problem occured more 
often. I searched for a function flushing the standard output, but 
didn't found such in the kernel and stdlib manuals to solve this 
problem. After putting "receive after N -> ok end" between the fwrite 
and halt the problem seemed to vanish (depending on N ...).

The interesting thing is, that there is no such problem on Mac OS X and 
NetBSD. I first thought, that this may be caused by the slower 
cpus/hardware. The win32-box has no other system installed, so I tried 
coLinux to test if it is caused by the faster cpu, but in coLinux it 
worked (but I don't know if and how big the speed loss is ...).

I browsed the mailing list archive, but didn't found something about 
this. Hope that I am not blind :)

I never looked at the implementation of Erlang to track down the 
problem, but for me it seems to be a Windows specific problem.

Ok here the technical details:
Windows XP SP 2, Erlang/OTP R10B-2 installed from the binary installer 
found at www.erlang.org

(the working setups - Mac OS X, ... - are self-compiled R10B-2 from source)

--
Matthias Kretschmer