Make it so that Parrot on RTEMS does not call the system exit()

[dukeleto]

There are various ways to make this happen, and various levels of configurability, such as allowing a custom exit handler, but for starters, we just want Parrot on RTEMS to unconditionally not call the system exit() when shutting down, as this causes RTEMS to reboot.

Other tickets can be opened for a more features in the future.

[dukeleto]

exit() is called on line 96 of src/exit.c . A compile-time macro should be put in that calls exit() unless the current OS is RTEMS.

[bacek]

There is also some calls to exit inside src/gc...

[julian.notfound@…]

>  There are various ways to make this happen, and various levels of
>  configurability, such as allowing a custom exit handler, but for starters,
>  we just want Parrot on RTEMS to unconditionally not call the system exit()
>  when shutting down, as this causes RTEMS to reboot.

Note that according to the docs all calls to exit or _exit are wrong.
The documented way to exit is to return control to whoever run the
first runloop on the main interpreter. The current behavior is wrong,
it breaks not only rtems, but embedding usages that wants to keep
running is spite of whatever happens in the parrot code.

So I think we must fix the full issue, not just making a special case for RTEMS.

-- 
Salu2

[jkeenan]

Commenters/committers:

Could we get an update on the status of this ticket?

Thank you very much.

kid51

[plobsing]

This is not an RTEMS-specific problem. Any embedding application (irssi, vim, apache, perl5, etc) also wants more control over what happens when parrot exits.

We should require a hook be installed on init by the parent application (and there is always a parent application, parrot.exe being a particularly simple one) to determine what happens in these cases.