When should I use std::thread::detach?

Question

In the destructor of std::thread, std::terminate is called if:

• the thread was not joined (with t.join())
• and was not detached either (with t.detach())

Thus, you should always either join or detach a thread before the flows of execution reaches the destructor.

---

When a program terminates (ie, main returns) the remaining detached threads executing in the background are not waited upon; instead their execution is suspended and their thread-local objects destructed.

Crucially, this means that the stack of those threads is not unwound and thus some destructors are not executed. Depending on the actions those destructors were supposed to undertake, this might be as bad a situation as if the program had crashed or had been killed. Hopefully the OS will release the locks on files, etc... but you could have corrupted shared memory, half-written files, and the like.

---

So, should you use join or detach ?

• Use join
• Unless you need to have more flexibility AND are willing to provide a synchronization mechanism to wait for the thread completion on your own, in which case you may use detach

You should call detach if you're not going to wait for the thread to complete with join but the thread instead will just keep running until it's done and then terminate without having the spawner thread waiting for it specifically; e.g.

std::thread(func).detach(); // It's done when it's done

detach basically will release the resources needed to be able to implement join.

It is a fatal error if a thread object ends its life and neither join nor detach has been called; in this case terminate is invoked.

This answer is aimed at answering question in the title, rather than explaining the difference between join and detach. So when should std::thread::detach should be used?

In properly maintained C++ code std::thread::detach should not be used at all. Programmer must ensure that all the created threads gracefully exit releasing all the acquired resources and performing other necessary cleanup actions. This implies that giving up ownership of threads by invoking detach is not an option and therefore join should be used in all scenarios.

However some applications rely on old and often not well designed and supported APIs that may contain indefinitely blocking functions. Moving invocations of these functions into a dedicated thread to avoid blocking other stuff is a common practice. There is no way to make such a thread to exit gracefully so use of join will just lead to primary thread blocking. That's a situation when using detach would be a less evil alternative to, say, allocating thread object with dynamic storage duration and then purposely leaking it.

#include <LegacyApi.hpp>
#include <thread>

auto LegacyApiThreadEntry(void)
{
    auto result{NastyBlockingFunction()};
    // do something...
}

int main()
{
    ::std::thread legacy_api_thread{&LegacyApiThreadEntry};
    // do something...
    legacy_api_thread.detach();
    return 0;
}

When you detach thread it means that you don't have to join() it before exiting main().

Thread library will actually wait for each such thread below-main, but you should not care about it.

detach() is mainly useful when you have a task that has to be done in background, but you don't care about its execution. This is usually a case for some libraries. They may silently create a background worker thread and detach it so you won't even notice it.