I know this isn't REALLY a Perl question, but I find it quite interesting anyways:

According to p. 55 of "Advanced Perl Programming" malloc is not reentrant and the implication the book lists is that if one is calling a function and the program receives a signal which calls the same function "the function gets totally confused and is likely to crash the system."
What exactly does this mean?
If ANY program is in a malloc block and a hardware interrupt occurs and the interrupt handler uses malloc, do problems occur? Or do interrupt handlers not use malloc then.
I suppose I would like to know why there is a problem w/ malloc ONLY in the specific case Sriram Srinivasan listed.


thanks.

I get the feeling I slept through an important lecture a while ago :)

In reply to Malloc is not reentrant? by floopy

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