Thread termination in Symbian

Question

I'm getting a little frustrated with the definition of Thread Termination they have in Symbian. Please, correct me if I am wrong. Threads in Symbian OS can end their life in 4 different ways:

1. When thread function exits normally;
2. When User::Exit() is called for current thread;
3. When thread is forced to die by calling RThread::Kill() or RThread::Terminate();
4. When panic has been raised on the thread by User::Panic

My question is: which one of these four situations corresponds to 'thread termination'?

PS: I came up with this question when while exploring "critical threads" definition in Symbian documentation. Maybe this extract could be helpful.

Answer 1

All of them. The SDK documentation specifies it quite exactly:

The death of a thread (and any subsequent notifications etc.) is effectively just an indication that the thread will never execute any more code; it does not guarantee that the operating system has yet finished removing the thread.

Now, if you're inspecting RThread::ExitType, you'll find the following information:

EExitKill The thread or process has ended as a result of a kill, i.e. Kill() has been called on the RThread or RProcess handle. Or a thread was ended as a result of calling User::Exit().

EExitTerminate The thread or process has ended as a result of a terminate, i.e. Terminate() has been called on the RThread or RProcess handle.

EExitPanic The thread or process has been panicked.

EExitPending The thread or process is alive.

For cases 1, 2 and Kill in case 3, you'll get EExitKill. Other cases are quite self-explanatory.