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Comment by hermitdev | Hacker News Reader

Stopped reading after reading main() returning doesn't end the (interactive) program and you have to manually hookup a signal, otherwise the program will continue running indefinitely. Seems error prone and very counterintuitive to me.

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I've stopped reading the above comment after "Stopped reading after".

I've never read anything insightful and not knee-jerky coming after those words...

Do you read your own comments? (Asking for a logician friend...)

Yes, as a meta-comment they belong to a different class (see Russel and co).

That's very typical of programs using a GUI platform. One way or another you have to kick off an event handler, whether it's TKinter or Qt or in this case, GTK. The event handler runs independent of your code and has to be told when to quit. I have to agree that

    GTK.Alert("Hello world!")
    -> signal_connect("destroy", lambda(){ exit(0); });

does seem to be less than intuitive and not a pretty thing to drop into a hello-world tutorial!

Yes, registering events in a GUI is common, but for a "Hello world!" to shutdown? Never seen it needed for something that simple.

The cli hello world exits with the main return value.

You’re missing out on a lot if you decide to stop reading things for reasons you find counterintuitive.

and it's also false. you missed that you have to explicitly tell pike to continue by returning -1 from main or calling the backend event loop explicitly.

any other program ends when main is exiting.

where did you read that

Towards the end of [0] which was linked from "I want my greeting in a window from [1]. The link has since been stricken out from when I looked at it several hours ago, so maybe its outdated?

I don't know... I've only done GUI work on Windows, but I've never had to register a signal handler to get my app to exit. Yeah, you might register handlers for events to control how the app shuts down (e.g. to save unsaved docs), but mandatory? I've not seen that before. [0] https://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/tut/hello/window.md [1] https://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/tut/

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