[erlang-questions] Scoped group leaders

[Robert Virding]

----- "Eric Merritt" <ericbmerritt@REDACTED> wrote:

> >
> >
> >> Just out of curiosity does a group leader go away when a group
> dies?
> >
> > Define group death?
> >
> 
> When when all processes in a group have terminated, either normally
> or
> abnormally.

Today there is nothing in the system which keeps track of the processes in a group, process groups don't really exist at all. A "process group" is those processes which have the same group leader. The group leader has no information about which processes have it as group leader. You can make any process a group leader by setting it as group leader.

Process groups were explicitly added in such a way as NOT to impose any structure or hierarchy on processes, process space is flat.

Robert