Question

I’m in a situation where calling join() on a boost::thread object throws a thread_resource_error exception. Looking at the documentation there is no mention of that this method could throw such an exception.

I’m not quite sure where to start debugging this. Any suggestions as to what could cause this?

Answer 1

Looking at the boost source code I found the following:

void thread::join()
{
    if (this_thread::get_id() == get_id())
    {
        boost::throw_exception(thread_resource_error(system::errc::resource_deadlock_would_occur, "boost thread: trying joining itself"));
    }
    detail::thread_data_ptr local_thread_info=(get_thread_info)();
    if(local_thread_info)
    {
        this_thread::interruptible_wait(local_thread_info->thread_handle,detail::timeout::sentinel());
        release_handle();
    }
}

So basically it has some undocumented behavior where it throws a thread_resource_error if a thread tries to join itself.