Sometimes, we need to kill a thread that has eaten too many resources or that is just executing for too long. For example, some parser works in a thread (and actively uses Boost.Thread), but we have already got the required amount of data from it, so parsing can be stopped. Here's the stub:
int main() {
boost::thread parser_thread(&do_parse);
// ...
if (stop_parsing) {
// No more parsing required.
// TODO: Stop the parser!
}
// ...
parser_thread.join();
}How can we do it?
Almost nothing is required for this recipe. You only need to have at least a basic knowledge of threads.
We can stop a thread by interrupting it:
if (stop_parsing) {
// No more parsing required.
parser_thread.interrupt();
}