Is it possible to kill a spinning thread?

Question

I am using ZThreads to illustrate the question but my question applies to PThreads, Boost Threads and other such threading libraries in C++.

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Answer 1

If you need to kill a thread, consider using a process instead.

Especially if you tell us that your "thread" is a while (true) loop that may sleep for a long period of time performing operations that are necessarily blocking. To me, that indicate a process-like behavior.

Processes can be terminated in a various number of ways at almost any time and always in a clean way. They may also offer more reliability in case of a crash.

Modern operating systems offer an array of interprocess communications facilities: sockets, pipes, shared memory, memory mapped files ... They may even exchange file descriptors.

Good OSes have copy-on-write mechanism, so processes are cheap to fork.

Note that if your operations can be made in a non-blocking way, then you should use a poll-like mechanism instead. Boost::asio may help there.