alt Hacker NewsThe first linked article was recently discussed here: RIP pthread_cancel (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45233713)
In that discussion, most of the same points as in this article were already discussed, specifically some async DNS alternatives.
See also here the discussion: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/13619
I am always amused when folks rediscover the bad idea that is `pthread_cancel()` — it’s amazing that it was ever part of the standard.
We knew it was a bad idea at the time it was standardized in the 1990s, but politics — and the inevitable allure of a very convenient sounding (but very bad) idea — meant that the bad idea won.
Funny enough, while Java has deprecated their version of thread cancellation for the same reasons, Haskell still has theirs. When you’re writing code in IO, you have to be prepared for async cancellation anywhere, at any time.
This leads to common bugs in the standard library that you really wouldn’t expect from a language like Haskell; e.g. https://github.com/haskell/process/issues/183 (withCreateProcess async exception safety)