[tor-dev] pid_t and MSVC

[Nick Mathewson]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 7:16 AM, Gisle Vanem <gvanem at broadpark.no> wrote:
> The use of 'pid_t' confuses me a bit:
>
>  In common/procmon.c (inside MS_WINDOWS), it's typedef'ed to  'int'
> unconditionally.
>
>  And then in common/util.* (tor_terminate_process()) it is assumed to be
>  defined in orconfig.h or somewhere else. It's not AFAICS.
>
> It is true that _getpid() returns an 'int', but the way Tor uses it seems
> wrong; the last argument to OpenProcess() takes a 'DWORD'. So 'pid_t'
> should be 'DWORD' IMHO.

If that's what we're going to do, we should make sure that we don't
use any posix-compatibility functions that return/expect an int pid,
like _getpid().  So perhaps we should have a tor_pid_t that's a DWORD
on windows and pid_t elsewhere, and we should stop using _getpid() in
favor of GetCurrentProcessId, assuming that that's really what we
ought to be calling.

> So maybe we should introduce a 'typedef DWORD tor_pid_t;' in orconfig.h?

Well, if we add AC_TYPE_PID_T in configure.in, then we can make sure
that pid_t is defined on autoconf-based builds, and we can define it
to DWORD for MSVC builds in src/win32/orconfig.h.  But I worry there:
it's a little error-prone to have a type that is unsigned in some
places and signed elsewhere.  We should audit all our pid_t uses if
we're going to try something like that.

-- 
Nick