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Section: 17.5 [support.start.term], 17.9.5 [exception.terminate] Status: New Submitter: JF Bastien Opened: 2018-03-15 Last modified: 2018-04-03
Priority: 3
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Discussion:
It's unclear how different termination facilities in C++ interact (and how they interact with the C termination facilities). Individually some of these functions try to handle corner cases, but hilarity ensues when combined with each other. As a simple example, can an atexit handler call exit? If not, can it call quick_exit, and can then at_quick_exit handler call exit? Is it possible to install an atexit handler from an at_quick_exit, without strongly happens before, while handling a separate atexit handler (and what happens then)?
The termination handlers and termination conditions I collected:returning from main calls atexit handlers.
atexit / exit
at_quick_exit / quick_exit
set_terminate
violating noexcept and other things that call std::terminate (see [except.terminate])
violating exception specification
parallel algorithms leaving with uncaught exception
some std::signal such as SIGTERM, SIGSEGV, SIGINT, SIGILL, SIGABRT, and (maybe?) SIGFPE.
set_unexpected (now a zombie)
unexpected_handler (now a zombie)
What's unclear is:
Is termination handling a DAG?
Which thread(s) are termination handlers called on?
Is program termination Turing complete?
I've written a sample program which exercises some of this, see here.
[2018-04-02, Jens comments]
Any potential wording should carefully take [basic.start] into account, and maybe should actually be integrated into the core wording, not the library wording.
[2018-04-02 Priority set to 3 after discussion on the reflector.]
Proposed resolution: