Why thread.stop deprecated and timer.cancel is not?

Question

What is the difference between stopping a java Thread and stopping an instance of Timer ?

Why is timer.cancel thread safe or is it ?

Answer 1

Cancelling a timer doesn't have any of the potentially destabilizing behaviour of aborting a thread. From the docs:

Does not interfere with a currently executing task (if it exists).

In other words, it's not going to try to stop a task which is already running, which could potentially end up with monitors not being released etc. It's just going to avoid running any more tasks.

Answer 2

Timer.cancel only cancels timer tasks that have not yet been started. The Thread.stop method stops the thread (by throwing an Error) and may leave the system in an inconsistent state, since the thread is stopped in an unknown place, possibly while doing something.