[D-runtime] A mechanism to kill threads

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

So that's the thing: You really need to know what the thread is doing
or you should not be killing it. Predicting GC allocations is hard,
but taking the global thread lock inside kill() eliminates that
problem (at least I *think* it does; it covers any case that I can
think of). In most cases where you kill threads, you either know what
they are doing, or assume that *they* know what they're doing (and
that "what" being something that won't make the planet implode once
they're killed).

Regards,
Alex

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 12:59 AM, Sean Kelly <sean at invisibleduck.org> wrote:
> That forces the GC to expose functionality for acquiring any relevant locks for something that really has nothing to do with memory allocation., and still only takes care of one potential deadlock, albeit a common one.  Critical sections would help as well (that's basically how pthread_cancel() works), but applying them to this case would be tricky.
>
> On May 16, 2012, at 3:54 PM, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
>
>> Again, this boils down to knowing what you're doing. You should NOT be
>> killing a thread if there is any chance whatsoever that the thread
>> could be doing GC allocation while you do it.
>>
>> That said, I'm not convinced that this is a problem that we cannot
>> work around; I think that if kill() would acquire the global thread
>> lock, this problem could be prevented from happening.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Alex
>>
>> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 12:52 AM, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, May 16, 2012 14:44:12 Sean Kelly wrote:
>>>> If the killed thread even has a chance of allocating memory ir could be
>>>> killed while inside the GC and lock all threads out of the GC forever.
>>>
>>> Ouch.
>>>
>>> - Jonathan M Davis
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> D-runtime mailing list
>>> D-runtime at puremagic.com
>>> http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/d-runtime
>> _______________________________________________
>> D-runtime mailing list
>> D-runtime at puremagic.com
>> http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/d-runtime
>
> _______________________________________________
> D-runtime mailing list
> D-runtime at puremagic.com
> http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/d-runtime