Stopping a thread from the calling process

[Gordon McMillan]

Scott Barron asks:

> is there an easy and fairly portable way of doing this?

If you mean "interrupting" or "killing", no. WIth good reason. 
OS level threads are often "light weight" processes. Generally 
what's been trimmed is all the stuff dealing with reclaming 
resources, releasing locks etc. on thread death. So if you 
"kill" a thread, you're likely to be leaving your process in an 
indeterminate state.

The normal idiom is to ask politely - have the thread 
periodically check some variable to see if it should stop.



- Gordon