Garbage collector and threads

[Nicolas Fleury]

Aahz wrote:
> What's "RAII"?

"Resource Acquisition Is Initialization"
It's a term frequently used in C++ to describe the use of constructor 
and destructor for resource allocation/deallocation.

>>to __del__, whatever it is ref-counting or something else.  Wouldn't a 
>>class like CancellableThread, with a sub-class implemented cancel method 
>>called when the object is not referred in any other thread be useful?
> 
> 
> Perhaps, but threading needs references to created threads in order to
> implement its functionality.  You might try building your own thread
> constructs using ``thread`` directly.

I still don't know how to implement it.  I can do something very simple 
like:

class Canceller:
     def __init__(self, thread):
         self.thread = thread
     def __del__(self):
         self.thread.cancel()
         self.thread.join()

but I can't merge the concept with a Thread class, because the self 
passed to run would be a reference to the object...  I don't know if a 
language extension would be worth the effort or if there's a cool 
solution I'm missing, but what is sure is that I write a lot of code to 
cancel threads in finalizers of parent objects.  I don't want deamon 
threads so that everything is stopped cleanly, but at the same time it 
is error-prone in a GUI application, because I risk to have the process 
still running after a quit.

I just want a way to garantee that all my threads are cancelled when the 
main thread is finished.

Regards,
Nicolas