Re: [Caml-list] Has the thread cancellation problem evolved ?

[Brian Hurt <bhurt@janestcapital.com>]

Robert Fischer wrote:

> Brian Hurt wrote:
>
>> So what happens if I throw an infinite loop into an exception handler?
>
> Now, my experience with .Net is somewhat dated, but I'm pretty sure it 
> re-hangs on your loop, and signaling another abort will break out of 
> your loop and continue up the chain of exception handlers.  At least 
> once upon a time, there was a very large business which I worked for 
> that did a lot of concurrent .Net work, and the standard solution was 
> to keep signaling the abort until the thing finally died.
>
> ~~ Robert.
>
>
Until you get someone "clever", who does something like (in Ocaml):

let rec do_my_work () =
    try
       do_a_bunch_of_work ()
    with
    | Thread_abort_exception ->
       (* Ack!  Someone tried to kill me!  I refuse to die! *)
       do_my_work ()
;;

I suppose eventually you'd blow stack.

Then, there's the what-if:

let rec example () =
    try
       do_a_bunch_of_work ()
    with
    | Thread_abort_exception ->
       raise (Invalid_arg "Ack!  They got me!")
;;

i.e. what happens if my catch expression raises another (different) 
exception?

Not to mention the fact that this solution requires a rather intrusive 
change to the run time, and a special exception which behaves 
differently from every other exception.

Brian