Deleting std::thread pointer raises exception “libc++abi.dylib: terminating”

Question

In C++ 11 with LLVM 6.0 on Mac OS X, I first created a pointer to a memory allocation of std::thread.

std::thread* th = new std::thread([&] (int tid) {
    // do nothing.
}, 0);

Then I tried to delete it.

delete th;

However, compiling the above code and execute it raises exception

libc++abi.dylib: terminating
Abort trap: 6

Answer 1

The thread you've created is joinable, and unless you join or detach it, std::terminate will be called when the destructor of the thread object executes. So you need

th->join();
delete th;

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Early proposals for std::thread implicitly detached the thread in the destructor, but this was found to cause problems when the owning thread threw an exception between creation and joining of a thread instance. N2802 contains the change proposal along with illustrative examples.

The original behavior was carried over from boost::thread but it too has since deprecated implicit detach in the destructor.

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Unrelated to your problem, but it is very unlikely you need to dynamically allocate the thread object, and even if you do, you should be storing it in a unique_ptr.