4 ms·

What Do You Do with InterruptedException (Java)? (2015)

2 points by nwatson 10y ago

nwatson 10y ago
The article and discussion regarding "Common Multithreading Mistakes in C# – Unsafe Assumptions" (HN 2017/02, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13704763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13704763) were good, and as others noted applies to a large degree to Java as well as C#. This brought to mind a related problem in Java, which the original article here discusses very well -- "What Do You Do With InterruptedException?". I worked with Java for several years recently at a low-engineering-function place where properly addressing InterruptedException was really really low-priority compared to other problems. So ... only one other team member seemed ready to discuss properly addressing InterruptedException though it was relevant to a lot of our use cases ... So I'm curious: * have others worked in environments where InterruptedException was actually both handled correctly, and proved useful? * how often have others seen frameworks that demand that you, as a framework user/extender, properly handle InterruptedException/Thread.interrupted() because they, i.e., the framework, will notify your framework thread to stop what it's doing via Thread.interrupt()? * how well to library-code implementers (e.g., code in public Maven artifacts) adhere to best practices in this area? As a product developer, or as a framework user, I don't think I'd ever want to exclusively rely on Thread.interrupted()/InterruptException to deal with "canceling" work. Of the 10 to 60 libraries I might typically use that do network I/O, disk I/O, sleep, etc., I don't think I ever could rely on all libraries properly propagating the "interrupted" status back to my own code. And I'd likely not manage to get co-workers to honor and propagate that either. I'd always end up writing own separate "job-status-checker" in worker threads to get them to find out whether they should continue with their work or quit, since there's low-trust with InterruptedException. So ... what's been your experience? [edits: re-wording, grammar]

2 points by nwatson 10y ago

The article and discussion regarding "Common Multithreading Mistakes in C# – Unsafe Assumptions" (HN 2017/02, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13704763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13704763) were good, and as others noted applies to a large degree to Java as well as C#. This brought to mind a related problem in Java, which the original article here discusses very well -- "What Do You Do With InterruptedException?". I worked with Java for several years recently at a low-engineering-function place where properly addressing InterruptedException was really really low-priority compared to other problems. So ... only one other team member seemed ready to discuss properly addressing InterruptedException though it was relevant to a lot of our use cases ... So I'm curious: * have others worked in environments where InterruptedException was actually both handled correctly, and proved useful? * how often have others seen frameworks that demand that you, as a framework user/extender, properly handle InterruptedException/Thread.interrupted() because they, i.e., the framework, will notify your framework thread to stop what it's doing via Thread.interrupt()? * how well to library-code implementers (e.g., code in public Maven artifacts) adhere to best practices in this area? As a product developer, or as a framework user, I don't think I'd ever want to exclusively rely on Thread.interrupted()/InterruptException to deal with "canceling" work. Of the 10 to 60 libraries I might typically use that do network I/O, disk I/O, sleep, etc., I don't think I ever could rely on all libraries properly propagating the "interrupted" status back to my own code. And I'd likely not manage to get co-workers to honor and propagate that either. I'd always end up writing own separate "job-status-checker" in worker threads to get them to find out whether they should continue with their work or quit, since there's low-trust with InterruptedException. So ... what's been your experience? [edits: re-wording, grammar]