yes i have seen the error of my ways, and am now using thread.interrupt () and i sprinkle interruption_point() in my inner loops of the thread thanks for the feedback. -dave On Oct 9, 2009, at 9:20 PM, Yigong Liu wrote:

It is kind of dangerous for one thread to kill another thread forcefully or directly, since the 2nd thread may be in the middle of holding a system resource or changing some state. Killing it may left the system in corrupted state. better using "cooperative" shutdown, the 1st thread sends the 2nd thread some notification, either thru shared state or interrupt. For similar reasons, java deprecated many thread api (http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/misc/threadPrimitiveDeprecation.ht... ).

...

wrote: David M. Cotter wrote: say i'm on the main thread, and i've got a thread::id of some other

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Andrey Semashev <andrey.semashev@gmail.com preemptive thread. i do not have the actual boost::thread object any more.

and i want to unceremoniously kill that thread. like right now.

how do i kill it? i don't see a way to recover the actual boost::thread from the thread::id. but even if i could, and then call thread.interrupt(), that's more of a polite request which is free to be ignored, rather than a you_must_die_now() thing.

The main problem with killing threads is that it doesn't unwind the stack and thus breaks RAII. Therefore the best "official" way to terminate the thread in C++ is to interrupt it. If you want to do it the hard way, you're in C world with pthread_kill and alikes.