Time to put a stop to Thread.stop? (original) (raw)

Alan Bateman Alan.Bateman at oracle.com
Fri May 24 13🔞37 UTC 2013

Thanks to everyone for the discussions and suggestions on this topic. I would like to proceed with the original proposal to change stop(Throwable) to throw UOE unconditionally. This means so special casing for ThreadDeath or the current thread. The no-arg Thread.stop() is not impacted.

I think it's reasonable to say that this method is not widely used. Mandy did a static analysis of thousands of unique artifacts in maven and we found only a tiny number of usages. Other corpora were searched too. A number of people mailed me privately to report sightings, in almost all cases the usages were completely broken and never worked (incorrect assumption that Thread.stop would wake-up threads blocked in I/O in at least two cases).

Clearly this change is significant and will need to documented in compatibility notes and migration documentation.

The webrev with the proposed changes is here. As I mentioned in one of the replies, there are 4 j.u.c tests that need to be updated so I've changed these tests to use Unsafe.throwException.

http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~alanb/7059085/webrev/

-Alan.

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