From: mental@...
Date: 2006-02-24T06:37:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Two Ruby threading questions

Quoting codeslinger <codeslinger@gmail.com>:

> If this is true (see my last post), then this is a design flaw in
> Ruby's threading library. This particular application will be
> long-running and cannot afford to have dead threads laying around
> waiting for exit (which hopefully will never come).

If the dead threads aren't referenced anywhere, the garbage
collector should clean them up.  Completed threads don't need to be
joined before destruction.

On the other hand, threads are not blithely terminated when some
"master" thread exits.  To complete your program, you would want to
signal each thread in an appropriate fashion so that it can finish
up what it's doing and exit cleanly.

-mental