[erlang-questions] Why does adding an io:format call make my accept socket remain valid?

[Vimal Kumar]

Matthew,

Like Nathaniel said, the eunit test should involve gen_server. Do not test
handle_cast/2 directly. Instead, run your test on an exported function
(say: Module:accept/0) which in turn should execute:

gen_server:cast(?MODULE, accept)

You can start a gen_server process, execute such tests and shut it down
properly using 'setup' Fixture: http://learnyousomeerlang.com/eunit#fixtures

Regards,
Vimal

On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 10:15 AM, Nathaniel Waisbrot <nathaniel@REDACTED
> wrote:

> I don't know about your garbage-collection question, but:
>
> > Why does that io:format/3 call (only when after the spawn/3 call) keep
> the socket open and active for the spawned process?  I wouldn't expect it
> to be garbage collected because the spawned process holds a reference to it
> (and even adding it to the State in the return doesn't fix it).  Only other
> thing I could think of was that handle_cast is run in it's own process
> which closes the socket when it dies (since it has ownership), but that
> doesn't make sense from what I've read about OTP.
>
>
> Normally handle_cast would be run in the gen_server's process (since
> that's the whole point), but it looks to me like in your test:
>
>
> >   spawn_link(fun () -> tcp_listener_server:handle_cast(accept, State)
> end),
>
>
> you are bypassing gen_server and instead ... telling handle_cast to run in
> its own one-off process.
>
>
> Do you mean to be doing this? In your test code, you could call
> gen_server:start/1 and then gen_server:cast/2 and get the actual gen_server
> behavior.
>
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