Time to put a stop to Thread.stop?

[Alan Bateman]

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.