Remotely Terminating Threads?
I'm using coroutines with loops in them, and I want to remotely terminate a coroutine while it's running. What I mean by that is I want to stop it completely outside of that thread, meaning I can't use something like coroutine.yield or a conditional in the running coroutine. Any help? The only solution I can think of is using a seperate script to emulate a coroutine, and destroy that script when I want the thread to stop. This seems ineffecient and messy though. Any ideas or links are appreciated, thanks!
2 answers
You cannot do this, because this is not in the spirit of threads, and it's definitely not in the spirit of cooperative execution, which is what coroutines are.
A coroutine has to choose to stop itself. This is because it's not necessarily clear where it's "OK" to stop -- what if it is half-way done with something important, and stopping it there will break everything?
It needs to choose to stop itself -- however, you can make it consult some flag that other scripts can command that will make it choose to stop:
function launch(stopper)
spawn(function()
repeat
wait()
print(math.random())
until stopper.stop
end)
end
s = {}
launch(s)
wait(5)
s.stop = true
The above creates a background loop that goes until stop is set on its argument, which is done after 5 seconds pass.
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Coroutines will stop if the loop finishes. So create a variable outside of the coroutine function and change it to complete the loop.
For example:
function foo()
local run = true;
local c = coroutine.wrap(function()
while run do
wait(1)
print("foo");
end
end)
c();
wait(10);
run = false;
end
If done right, you can send the function and change the value at a different time to stop it. You can make the variable global or adjust the scope to suit your needs.