>Even things like flushing or syncing a file probably don’t belong in atexit since you should assume your program will run a long time so you want important stu

>Even things like flushing or syncing a file probably don’t belong in atexit since you should assume your program will run a long time so you want important stuff flushed and synced way before the exit happens. I definitely want buffers to be flushed to disk if the user Ctrl-C's the program. The OS only ensures that the resources are released at the OS level, but does nothing to prevent the persistent application state becoming inconsistent at the application level. The really hardcore way to do this is to structure your whole program so that all state is recorded as deltas appended to a WAL, with a background thread/process periodically merging this into "current state" -- in that case, even pulling the power cord can't leave your application in an inconsistent state. But that's a whole lot of work, and just best-effort flushing buffers on exit gets you 80% of the way there.