Introduction

While creating a critical piece of software (e.g. creating a Smart Home Controller for my Master's Thesis), one of the emphasis is on reliability.

Broadly speaking, reliability means not crashing or, failing that, exiting gracefully and then restarting without requiring any supervision.

Hence, I set about to write a tiny wrapper to execute applications in, which will wait for heartbeats from the application, restart them if they miss too many heartbeats or if they crash (exit with a non-zero return value), and will listen to the outside world and restart the application when asked to.

Wrapper ensuring some level of reliability