Is it a bad idea to start a thread in init method? [closed]

Question

I have a class which acts like a Queue in which I am creating a worker thread. This worker thread would be responsible for processing each item from the queue.

Since an instance of this class should always have a worker thread, I am creating and starting the worker thread in the init method itself.

I would like to know if it is a bad practice to do so.

e.g

class CustomQueue:

    def __init__(self):
        # some initialization
        self.worker = threading.Thread(target=sometarget)
        self.worker.start()

Answer 1

It is OK, but you will need to add a __del__ method that stops the thread so that the thread doesn't hang around after the CustomQueue object dissapears. This __del__ method will be called when the CustomQueue instance is garbage collected.