Re: [RFC] Toward Shareable POSIX Signals

[Florian Weimer <fweimer at redhat dot com>]

On 03/08/2018 06:52 PM, Daniel Colascione wrote:
> Windows Vectored Exception Handlers
> -----------------------------------
>
> Windows isn’t a POSIX system and doesn’t have signals per se, but it
> does have a similar concept of a global unhandled “exception” (e.g.,
> SIGSEGV-equivalent) handler. Vectored Exception Handlers allow
> multiple components to cooperate in handling these exceptions and
> operate very similarly to the mechanism that this document proposes.

For many of the things you listed (particularly the synchronously 
delivered signals), Structured Exception Handling (SEH) would actually 
be the proper model (with a table-driven implementation).  It would 
allow to install handlers for small regions of code, which helps with 
modularity, and the handlers would be effectively thread-local.

For asynchronously delivered signals (such as subprocess termination), 
the signal mechanism may not be entirely appropriate anyway.  For those, 
standardizing on a single event loop looks like the right solution, and 
glib has largely taken over there.  Any other effort would simply 
undermine that, and not increase consolidation.

Thanks,
Florian