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by int_19h
239 days ago
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> Do you mean that there is no valid use-case where you wish to interrupt a blocking thread due to I/O, for example? This is certainly a common case, but killing a thread with a blocking native call on it is a very poor way to do so (not the least because you don't know what locks it might be holding at the moment it gets killed - imagine what happens if that's one of the locks used by low-level heap, for example). The proper way to address it is to use asynchronous I/O APIs that allow for cooperative cancellation. Unfortunately Linux doesn't exactly have a good track record in that department, which is why people do these kinds of hacks. On Windows you get stuff like https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/cance.... |
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>The proper way to address it is to use asynchronous I/O APIs that allow for cooperative cancellation.
I completely agree here. Async is the go-to for IO-bound operations and the ability to cancel (sends an exception to the task) is a very useful feature.
Killing threads, as in non-gracefully stopping them is a bad idea regardless of language, and not something I would encourage nor something I do myself.
In Python, if there is CPU-bound long-running routine that need to be executed concurrently, then this can be done using multiprocessing. I'd say, if external resource usage is well-defined then a good way to stop such a task would be to send a sigterm, wait, then send a signal 9 if it hasn't stopped after a grace period. If needed, perform a cleanup afterwards.
The problem with python and threads in my experience is that even a graceful interruption of individual threads can be tedious to get right.
Thanks for the link btw.