Re: [boost] threads: how to remotely kill a thread?

Subject: Re: [boost] threads: how to remotely kill a thread?
From: Andrey Semashev (andrey.semashev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-10-02 12:16:09

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