Do child threads exit when the parent thread terminates

Question

I was doing some multithreaded programming in Visual studio C++ using the calls beginthreadex, endthreadex.

I create a child thread thread1. The child thread runs on a function which never exits as it has an infinite loop. Now if the parent thread terminates with error or finishes successfully, does the child thread also exit? My doubt is - is there any situation where the child thread is alive even after the main program exits?

For linux how should this case be?

Answer 1

There is no parent/child relationship between threads. If thread A creates thread B and then thread A terminates, then thread B will continue to execute.

The exception to this is when the main thread (that is, the thread that runs the main() function) terminates. When this happens, the process terminates and all other threads stop.

Answer 2

Since C and C++ mandate that returning from the main function kills all running threads, yes, the process should be gone. And since that behavior is done by the runtime the situation should be the same on Linux.