[squeak-dev] System and user processes

Tony Garnock-Jones tonyg at ccs.neu.edu
Mon Jun 20 19:32:14 UTC 2016


Hi Max,

Perhaps a notion of process grouping might make sense? Following the
zero-one-infinity principle, having exactly two kinds of process seems a
bit odd.

Having process grouping would lead to a tree of processes.

For example, the outermost level could be "system" processes, of which
one was a group containing all "user" processes.

Or, the outermost level could have two children, one group of "system"
procs, one of "user" procs; or, ...

The "current process group" would be a kind of dynamic parameter, and
newly-forked processes would by default become siblings of the forker in
the current group.

Regards,
  Tony



On 06/19/2016 05:03 AM, Max Leske wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In Pharo and Squeak we have no separation between processes that
> belong to the IDE, tools etc. and processes that are spawned as part
> of an application. I’d like to know your opinion on the following
> (rough) idea:
> 
> 1. We introduce two subclasses of Process: SystemProcess and
> UserProcess 2. We define #isSystemProcess and #isUserProcess 3. We
> introduce #newSystemProcess and #newUserProcess 4. We deprecate
> #newProcess and delegate to #newUserProcess (thereby modifying all
> users of #forkXXX to yield instances of UserProcess)
> 
> Of the following I’m less sure: 5. We introduce #forkSystemProcess
> et. al
> 
> I’ve tried this out in Pharo 6 and there seem to be no problems with
> the VM. The benefit would be improved separation between system and
> user space. It would allow us to implement stuff for processes in
> general (e.g. for the debugger) which we do not want to affect system
> processes like the UI process or the background process. One concrete
> example: the process browser could hide all system processes and make
> them visible on demand (that would greatly improve the view because
> you can now better find your own processes).
> 
> 
> I’m looking forward to your comments.
> 
> Cheers, Max
> 


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