Ironically it's actually the opposite. Linux has signals, and with the exception of SIGKILL and I think SIGABRT they can all be handled gracefully. Windows on the other hand doesn't have signals, it can only TerminateProcess() which is forceful. The illusion of graceful termination on windows is done by sending a Window close message to all of the windows belonging to a given process, however in the event the process has no windows, only forceful termination is available due to the lack of a real mechanism to gracefully terminate processes. That's why the taskkill command tells you a process requires forceful termination when you run it against something headless.

[–] mkwt@lemmy.world 93 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Windows does, in fact, have signals. They're just not all the same as Unix signals, and the behavior is different. Here's a write-up.

You're correct there is no "please terminate but you don't have to" signal in Windows. Windowless processes sometimes make up their own nonstandard events to implement the functionality. As you mentioned, windowed processes have WM_CLOSE.

Memory access violations (akin to SIGSEGV), and other system exceptions can be handled through Structured Exception Handling.

[–] Scoopta@programming.dev 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

TIL about the console signaling stuff, good to know. I am aware of SEH but that seemed a little too in the weeds for this discussion since that's as you say akin to SIGSEGV

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 14 points 3 months ago

The NT kernel was all built to emulate object orientation (read Smalltalk, not C++) style message passing. That's because it was the 90s, and it's the new technology kernel.

So yeah, expect everything to have more flexibility sending data around, and no standardization at all so you can't have any generic functionality.

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