What is an appropriate way to programmatically exit an application?

Question

I am evaluating user inputs as commands for my application. If the user presses Q, or q, and then hits enter, the application quits and execution terminate

Answer 1

Resources are cleaned up automatically by the OS when the process exits. There are two primary reasons to not just exit() from the middle of the code (this applies to all languages).

• There may be some action that needs to be taken before the program ends. For example, you may need to save any open files (i.e. write changes that for performance or other reasons have not been sent to the file yet).

• Someone may want to later use your code for some other purpose.

Take for example, the Git version control system. There's several efforts to turn the code into a library instead of a set of stand-alone executables so that it can be efficiently incorporated into other projects. One of the problems (from what I've heared) is that the code sometimes simply terminates instead of tracking and cleaning up the resources it's using. As an executable that's fine, but if it was imported as a library, you don't always want to just terminate the host application because you've finished your little part.