Using "terminate" declare prevents app profiling completion

Targets macOS
1

As many of us have learned, 64bit Mac OS apps will crash on close if we have any code in CancelClose. To solve this, a call to a Cocoa function “terminate” is used:

[code] #If targetMacOS Then
Declare Function NSClassFromString Lib “Cocoa” ( aClassName As CFStringRef ) As Integer
Declare Function sharedApplication Lib “Cocoa” selector “sharedApplication” ( classRef As Integer ) As Integer
Declare Sub terminate Lib “Cocoa” selector “terminate:” ( appRef As Integer, sender As Integer )

Dim appInstance As Integer = sharedApplication( NSClassFromString( "NSApplication" ) )
terminate( appInstance, appInstance )

#EndIf[/code]
There is a bad side effect from this if you are trying to profile you code - the profile summary is discarded since the profiler stub thinks that the app exit improperly.

So, we either get a profiler result with a probable app crash on quit, or we don’t get the profiler report.

Questions - for @Joe Ranieri :
Is the crash on quit being resolved

for others:
Do you use Profiling in your built apps for BETA and, if so, have you run into and worked around this?

2

as far as I know app must quit properly to transfer measurements back to IDE, so you can’t use terminate.

3

I’m not running in the IDE - I need results from actual use cases at the customer location. In the IDE, I can simply add an “If Not DebugBuild Then” block around the terminate declares code and ignore the crash.

Which begs the next question - why doesn’t the profile result get returned even IF the app “crashes” before quit?

4

The application shut down mechanism handles the writing of the profile data from memory. If the app crashes this can’t happen.

5

The IDE has code in its application instance cancel close event handler and doesn’t crash on quit so this must depend on what code is in there.

6

a) Write your own profiling
b) use XCode instead (mostly kidding)

I’m interested in this, too, because I have the opposite problem. My app doesn’t quit at all in 64bit. <https://xojo.com/issue/48395> . The chances of getting this fixed are pretty low.

7

Is it still the case? I tried your test app with 2018r1.1 and it quits on macOS 64 Bit.

8
  1. Yes; am still using macOS 10.11 for development; where this API is not required to exit correctly.
  2. However I do use this API when not profiling so that I can get the “Resume” functionality.
  3. I’ve started to use my own profiler; the main reason being is that it writes the results as it goes along. This allows me to get a lossy overview of what the changes do in real time. It still has many many kinks and doesn’t work correctly, so I suspect it needs a rebuild.