My organization recently upgraded to C++11 and we're running into a problem. We use the POSIX threading library, and in some rare cases (pthread_join doesn't exit within a specified timeout, for example), we'll kill a thread via pthread_cancel. In C++, thread cancellation is implemented via the abi::__forced_unwind exception[1], and in C++03, this worked well for us. In C++11, all destructors are noexcept(true) by default. So if you try to cancel a thread that's in a destructor, the abi::__forced_unwind exception will escape the destructor, std::terminate() will be invoked, and your program dies. I have written a simple program that can reproduce this.[2] What's the best way to solve this problem? I could avoid using pthread_cancel, but I was hoping to be able to upgrade to C++11 without making major changes like that. I could flag all my destructors as noexcept(false), but that's tedious and doesn't cover third party code like the STL or Boost. I briefly looked into std::thread, but it looks like std::thread doesn't have a cancellation mechanism. I have reproduced this with a couple of different libstdc++ versions (4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04 being the newest package I have tested with). Would upgrading to a newer version fix my problem? Any other ideas? Do I just need to accept the fact that C++11 broke POSIX thread cancellation and there's always going to be a chance that pthread_cancel will cause my application to terminate? Thanks, John [1] http://udrepper.livejournal.com/21541.html [2] https://gist.github.com/jsaxton/dc601e29fbe8c7c8f1b2
