[c++] How do I terminate a thread in C++11?

I don't need to terminate the thread correctly, or make it respond to a "terminate" command. I am interested in terminating the thread forcefully using pure C++11.

This question actually have more deep nature and good understanding of the multithreading concepts in general will provide you insight about this topic. In fact there is no any language or any operating system which provide you facilities for asynchronous abruptly thread termination without warning to not use them. And all these execution environments strongly advise developer or even require build multithreading applications on the base of cooperative or synchronous thread termination. The reason for this common decisions and advices is that all they are built on the base of the same general multithreading model.

Let's compare multiprocessing and multithreading concepts to better understand advantages and limitations of the second one.

Multiprocessing assumes splitting of the entire execution environment into set of completely isolated processes controlled by the operating system. Process incorporates and isolates execution environment state including local memory of the process and data inside it and all system resources like files, sockets, synchronization objects. Isolation is a critically important characteristic of the process, because it limits the faults propagation by the process borders. In other words, no one process can affects the consistency of any another process in the system. The same is true for the process behaviour but in the less restricted and more blur way. In such environment any process can be killed in any "arbitrary" moment, because firstly each process is isolated, secondly, operating system have full knowledges about all resources used by process and can release all of them without leaking, and finally process will be killed by OS not really in arbitrary moment, but in the number of well defined points where the state of the process is well known.

In contrast, multithreading assumes running multiple threads in the same process. But all this threads are share the same isolation box and there is no any operating system control of the internal state of the process. As a result any thread is able to change global process state as well as corrupt it. At the same moment the points in which the state of the thread is well known to be safe to kill a thread completely depends on the application logic and are not known neither for operating system nor for programming language runtime. As a result thread termination at the arbitrary moment means killing it at arbitrary point of its execution path and can easily lead to the process-wide data corruption, memory and handles leakage, threads leakage and spinlocks and other intra-process synchronization primitives leaved in the closed state preventing other threads in doing progress.

Due to this the common approach is to force developers to implement synchronous or cooperative thread termination, where the one thread can request other thread termination and other thread in well-defined point can check this request and start the shutdown procedure from the well-defined state with releasing of all global system-wide resources and local process-wide resources in the safe and consistent way.

Tips of using OS-dependent function to terminate C++ thread:

1. std::thread::native_handle() only can get the thread’s valid native handle type before calling join() or detach(). After that, native_handle() returns 0 - pthread_cancel() will coredump.

2. To effectively call native thread termination function(e.g. pthread_cancel()), you need to save the native handle before calling std::thread::join() or std::thread::detach(). So that your native terminator always has a valid native handle to use.

More explanations please refer to: http://bo-yang.github.io/2017/11/19/cpp-kill-detached-thread .

I guess the thread that needs to be killed is either in any kind of waiting mode, or doing some heavy job. I would suggest using a "naive" way.

Define some global boolean:

std::atomic_bool stop_thread_1 = false;

Put the following code (or similar) in several key points, in a way that it will cause all functions in the call stack to return until the thread naturally ends:

if (stop_thread_1)
    return;

Then to stop the thread from another (main) thread:

stop_thread_1 = true;
thread1.join ();
stop_thread_1 = false; //(for next time. this can be when starting the thread instead)

@Howard Hinnant's answer is both correct and comprehensive. But it might be misunderstood if it's read too quickly, because std::terminate() (whole process) happens to have the same name as the "terminating" that @Alexander V had in mind (1 thread).

Summary: "terminate 1 thread + forcefully (target thread doesn't cooperate) + pure C++11 = No way."