Time to put a stop to Thread.stop?

Alan Bateman Alan.Bateman at oracle.com
Tue May 14 14:25:19 UTC 2013


I would like to broach the subject of pulling out the implementation of 
Thread.stop(Throwable), maybe suspend/resume later. By "pulling out" I 
mean changing it to unconditionally throw UnsupportedOperationException.

As we all know, these methods have been deprecated since 1998 so that's 
15 years to design out any need for these methods. That said, I 
periodically come across code that uses no-arg Thread.stop(). David 
Holmes mentioned to me recently that he came across a usage in the 
recent past too. I don't think I've ever come across code using 
Thread.stop(Throwable) and this one is arguably the most dangerous of 
the group.

So I'm curious if anyone has come across a Thread.stop(Throwable) usage 
in recent times. Clearly changing this would be a significant change but 
the real impact might be close to zero. If we decide this is the right 
thing to do then there is a bit of detail to work out, that's for later.

-Alan.



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