Endless Loops and Stack Overflow

[albert...@ynnova.it]

Hi,

 

I am Alberto and I am exploring IronJs for using it as a rules engine.

I would like to know if there is any built in feature in IronJs for handling any endless loops or stack overflow (like in case of a recursive call that never exits) that a user could eventually write in the script?

 

Thank you

Alberto

[John Gietzen]

Unfortunately, the best you can do is to run the scripts in another thread and set a timeout.

It is IMPOSSIBLE (in any language) to detect all possible infinite loops.

See the Wikipedia article on the halting problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

Thanks!
John Gietzen

[albert...@ynnova.it]

Thank you John for suggestion.

 

Alberto

[albert...@ynnova.it]

Hi John,

 

about running the script in a separated thread and using a timeout for 'killing' in in case it is taking a too long time i agree and i think is a good solution.

 

But about the endless recoursive call...i 've seen that in this case in IronJs the Context.Execute method raises a StackOverflowException.

This is the point...it is impossibile to catch this exception. If this happens...my main process will die.

A solution could be to run the script in a separated process...but in my case for some limitation of the hosting machine/environment i cannot do it.

 

So i'm asking if there is already something in the engine of IronJs to detect this kind of problem before the StackOverflowException happens.

Something that can detect/catch that problem and then notify it in a different way, for avoiding the process die.

 

If someone already face this kind of problme...how did you solve it?

 

Bye bye

Alberto