> >> Redmond crowd should be able to figure out that recycling
> process IDs
> >> instantly would be a stupid idea...)
>
> > Can you explain more of this? IMHO, if we rely on feature
> like this,
> > the difference is unstable-every-day vs. unstable-every-year.
>
> The mere existence of the kill() primitive should bring to
> mind reasons why it's a bad idea.
Except the kill() primitive *does not exist* on windows.
That said, how did you go about to confirm that the pid is recycled
instantly? I was under the impression that it assignes any unused pid in
random order, which is also what a quick glance at my XP box looks like
(don't have a 2000 box around, but I wasn't aware of such a change
between those - but it's certainly not impossible). But if oyu had some
better method of determining it, please let me know :-)
If that's how, several other OSes do the same thing AFAIK - for security
reasons. For example OpenBSD. So if we rely heavily on that, we may be
in trouble elsewhere as well.
//Magnus