Hacker News Reader

Also, if you pull the power plug, neither finally blocks nor defers would run. I personally consider it a clear and obvious deficiency in the semantics (and the implementations) of those programming languages but everybody refuses to listen to me.

View on HN

Back in the days of spinning rust, we had RAID controller cards with batteries, so that if someone pulled the plug, there would be enough power to keep the drives going until any buffered writes were completed.

I certainly wouldn't mind if modern servers had something similar to make sure programs could stop gracefully. But then that doesn't help if you have a hardware failure...

Apparently, Windows does have precisely that, FlushFileBuffers [0][1]. The analogue in the Unix world is fsync(). Of course, some hard drives lie about actually having written their caches down, in which case there is nothing much anyone can do.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/...

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170510-00/?p=95...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com