RE: [GD-Windows] Stopping a thread cleanly

[Brian H. <bri...@py...>]

> Somehow, you're giving this worker thread instructions, so I'd 
> suggest sending a shutdown message the same way you send other 
> commands to the thread.

Actually, I'm not giving it instructions -- it's completely autonomous
based on the parameter passed to it which is a pointer to the shared
data it needs to operate on.  It doesn't have any communication
mechanism with the main thread except for the synchronization objects.

> If the worker thread is supposed to asynchronously "pick up" work 
> every so often (sometimes necessary) then you should use the 
> time- out on the wait operation as your throttle for when to look for 
> more work. That way, you can signal this event (or whatever) when 
> it's time to exit, and the thread will immediately wake up and 
> exit, instead of you having to wait for however long the sleep 
> operation would take. You can even use the condition of "waiting 
> for this object did NOT return time-out" as your exit condition, 
> for a race condition free way of doing it :-)
 
> Finally, the most dangerous thing with exiting threads is having 
> other threads wait for those threads; unless you design carefully, 
> it's very easy to get into deadlock that way...

Yeah, that can be nasty, but thankfully it's only a single thread and
only one place kills it, basically via:

SetEvent( event );

while ( !gThreadDead ) ; //pray that gThreadDead actually gets set

DeleteSharedData();

Brian