On Wed, 17 Oct 2018 03:49:37 +0100, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 16/10/2018 15.38, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Tue, 16 Oct 2018 01:47:33 +0100, Ant wrote:

Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
When you close a program or game, provided you're not saving a file,
why doesn't it happen immediately? What on earth has it to do?

Probably using a lot of resources like memories, storage, etc.

But stopping using those should be instant. Just mark them as empty.

Maybe it has to go through a long list and marking each one as free or
whatever, in the correct order. Or worse, it has to load each resource
from disk for some reason before clearing it. Maybe it fills them with
zeroes before releasing them.

I can't see the need for that, it should just say to Windows "this area of memory is now available for use" then close.

Maybe it has to do something online, like log off, if it is one of those
games.

No, that's disabled.

Maybe it checks for some thing, or writes some data to some file.
Status, scores... maybe it has to calculate those first.

No, this still happens if I save the game first, then when exiting I say "don't save".

Maybe it was running some thread in background doing something, like
calculating an strategy, or indexing, and it has to finish it first
(wait for the task to reach an exit or control point).

Thousand reasons you need to look at the code to know which :-)