Terminate a task

[Bob Cowdery]

Is there any way to terminate a task that is stuck on a blocking call. I can see that I can call istaskdone() or start a Timeout to know that the task is potentially blocked but I don't see anything in Task that lets me terminate it.

Bob

[Jameson Nash]

You can throw an error in the task, or just allow the gc to delete it. 

[Stefan Karpinski]

I think the question is if there's a way to externally interrupt a task.

[Bob Cowdery]

Could you clarify please. If its on a blocking call how do I throw an error and if its not complete why would the gc delete it.

[Amit Murthy]

I think currently the only way to interrupt a task is when it is blocked on a condition variable by using the "notify" call. Will be good to have a "terminate(t::Task)" call.

[Stefan Karpinski]

Yes, we need this ability. Externally terminating and otherwise interacting with tasks is a good way to deal with things like timeouts and cancelling distributed work.

[Jameson Nash]

Alternatively, might be fun to make a ccall_in_worker_thread intrinsic which handles all of the fiddly gc details and only blocks the local task (and/or returns a remoteref)

[Amit Murthy]

Issue created : https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/6283