A few weeks ago, I learned about something called crash-only software (ht, Robert Greco). This is software that has no normal “start” or “stop” mechanisms. It can only be stopped by crashing it. Often this means unplugging the computer physically. It can only be restarted through some sort of failure-recovery routine, with a hard reboot being the most extreme kind. There’s a whole theory of crash-only software design apparently.
