How to terminate or suspend a Rust thread from another thread?

Question

Editor\'s note — this example was created before Rust 1.0 and the specific types have changed or been removed since then. The general questio

Answer 1

Having been back to this question several times myself, here's what I think addresses OP's intent and others' best practice of getting the thread to stop itself. Building on the accepted answer, Crossbeam is a nice upgrade to mpsc in allowing message endpoints to be cloned and moved. It also has a convenient tick function. The real point here is it has try_recv() which is non-blocking.

I'm not sure how universally useful it'd be to put a message checker in the middle of an operational loop like this. I haven't found that Actix (or previously Akka) could really stop a thread without--as stated above--getting the thread to do it itself. So this is what I'm using for now (wide open to correction here, still learning myself).

// Cargo.toml:
// [dependencies]
// crossbeam-channel = "0.4.4"

use crossbeam_channel::{Sender, Receiver, unbounded, tick};
use std::time::{Duration, Instant};

fn main() {
    let (tx, rx):(Sender, Receiver) = unbounded();
    let rx2 = rx.clone();

    // crossbeam allows clone and move of receiver
    std::thread::spawn(move || {
        // OP:
        // let mut timer = Timer::new().unwrap();
        // let periodic = timer.periodic(Duration::milliseconds(200));

        let ticker: Receiver = tick(std::time::Duration::from_millis(500));

        loop {
            // OP:
            // periodic.recv();
            crossbeam_channel::select! {
                recv(ticker) -> _ => {

                    // OP: Do my work here
                    println!("Hello, work.");

                    // Comms Check: keep doing work?
                    // try_recv is non-blocking
                    // rx, the single consumer is clone-able in crossbeam
                    let try_result = rx2.try_recv();
                    match try_result {
                        Err(_e) => {},
                        Ok(msg) => {
                            match msg.as_str() {
                                "END_THE_WORLD" => {
                                    println!("Ending the world.");
                                    break;
                                },
                                _ => {},
                            }
                        },
                        _ => {}
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    });

    // let work continue for 10 seconds then tell that thread to end.
    std::thread::sleep(std::time::Duration::from_secs(10));
    println!("Goodbye, world.");
    tx.send("END_THE_WORLD".to_string());
}

Using strings as a message device is a tad cringeworthy--to me. Could do the other suspend and restart stuff there in an enum.