The somewhat peculiar behavior of Ruby’s Thread#raise
Here’s something that’s perhaps not entirely obvious: when you call Thread#raise, the exception will be raised at whatever point of execution that thread happens to be at.
See how the stack trace in the exception shows a different line of code each time? It’s understandable that it would behave like this — I can’t think of any other behavior that would make more sense. But it should only be used when the code inside the thread knows that it’s being called from a particular outer context, and that the outer context might have its own problems that it them tells the thread about. Example:
Unfortunately, Ruby’s timeout library uses Thread#raise, even though it is frequently used around enormous amounts of arbitrary code and libraries that might have no idea that they are being called within Timeout#timeout and can’t be expected to elegantly handle a timeout event at every single point in the code. Furthermore, this inner code might have blocks that call top-level Exception, which will then catch the exception that Timeout sends, handle it in a way it wasn’t written for, and not raise it back up to the Timeout.timeout invocation. I’ll elaborate on this issue more in future posts.
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