zlacker

>>djha-s+(OP)
Externally canceling a task at a location other than a known stopping point is used as an example here, but in most environments doing this is a known-bad design decision, since the terminated thread-or-task might have been holding a mutex, and now that mutex is stuck closed forever. .NET has been closing the door on this primitive for years (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/compatibility/...)

>>keving+F7
It makes me wonder if there are any language constructs that can make this a reasonable feature. One idea I've been tossing around is having the ability to roll back any changes to mutex-guarded data if an exception drops a mutex guard. It should be possible with the right language constructs and bookkeeping.

Perhaps there are other mechanisms out there too.

I feel like the ability to destroy another thread isnt inherently bad, just... bad with today's languages. Just a feeling though.

>>verdag+k9
It seems to me that what you are describing is usually called software transactional memory. It has its own set of problems (bad performance with high granularity and livelocks, although you can probably avoid livelocks if you only care about using it for abnormal terminations) but it doesn't fully resolve the problem here. Yes, not leaving memory in an invalid state goes a long way but any form of IPC is potentially problematic: consider what happens if the thread is writing to a socket borrowed from a pool, or to a disk file.

Not impossible to deal with but everything you do needs to be designed with cancellation-at-any-point in mind, it doesn't seem worth it to me.