On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 06:38:46PM -0000, Gary McGovern wrote:
> I'm also interested to know the origin of zombie and its relevance to Squeak. My "guess" is yes for 
> MVC and no for Morphic. Anyone know ?

The term "zombie" has a very specific, if somewhat whimsical, meaning
for a Unix operating system. On Unix, every process is created ("forked")
by a parent process. The parent process is expected to wait for its
child to exit, after which the parent collects certain statistics about
the completed child process. When a child process has executed the exit()
system call, but its parent has not yet collected those statistics, the
child process is said to be in the "zombie" state. Think of it as a
process which as died but has not yet left this world.

This has no connection whatsoever to Squeak or Morphic. Well, maybe a
very slight connection: If you are using OSProcess for Squeak on a
Unix system, you will see that any external process which you create
from Squeak gets cleaned up by a Smalltalk process when it exits
(UnixOSProcessAccessor>>grimReaperProcess). If the grimReaperProcess
was not there, you would have zombies every time you started an
external process from Squeak. In other words, the child processes
would exit, but no parent process would clean up after them, and they
would hang around as "zombies" forever.

Dave

(how's that for topic drift?)