You can easily forget pending tasks. That’s a single line of code like this: task.ContinueWith( t => { }, TaskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnFaulted ); However,

You can easily forget pending tasks. That’s a single line of code like this: task.ContinueWith( t => { }, TaskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnFaulted ); However, graceful cancellation is indeed hard. Doable in .NET but not easy, you gonna need to manually pass these cancellation tokens all the way down. Do you have an example of a language/runtime/etc where the cancellation's easy? It's easy to kill processes from the outside, but even for threads it's borderline impossible without horrible side effects.