Uncertain death

[Ulf Wiger (AL/EAB)]

When you send an exit signal to a process,
it is scheduled in order to receive it.
This goes for 'kill' messages as well, even
though you'd think that they could be 
killed right away by the runtime system.

/Uffe

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-erlang-questions@REDACTED 
> [mailto:owner-erlang-questions@REDACTED] On Behalf Of 
> Dominic Williams
> Sent: den 17 november 2005 23:32
> To: 'erlang-questions@REDACTED'
> Subject: Uncertain death
> 
> Hello,
> 
> The following program seems to me to indicate that when a 
> processes gets killed, there is, for a brief moment, 
> contradictory information about its state. Specifically, the 
> information returned by processes() seems to lag behind that 
> given by is_process_alive().
> 
> 
> %%% death.erl
> 
> -module (death).
> -export ([run/0, server/0]).
> 
> run() ->
>      Pid = spawn (?MODULE, server, []),
>      exit (Pid, kill),
>      report (Pid),
>      timer:sleep(1000),
>      report (Pid).
> 
> report (Pid) ->
>      io:fwrite("~p alive: ~p; member of processes(): ~p~n",
>                [Pid, is_process_alive (Pid),
>                 lists:member(Pid, processes())]).
> 
> server () ->
>      receive
>          hello ->
>              server();
>          stop ->
>              bye
>      end.
> 
> %%% end death.erl
> 
> 1> c("/Users/dodo/tmp/death", [{outdir, "/Users/dodo/tmp/"}]).
> {ok,death}
> 2> death:run().
> <0.35.0> alive: false; member of processes(): true <0.35.0> 
> alive: false; member of processes(): false ok
> 
> Same result under MacOS/R9C and WinXP/R10B
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Dominic Williams
> http://www.dominicwilliams.net
> 
> ----
>