How do you kill Futures once they have started?

It’s kind of painful. Essentially, your worker threads have to be finished before your main thread can exit. You cannot exit unless they do. The typical workaround is to have some global state, that each thread can check to determine if they should do more work or not.

Here’s the quote explaining why. In essence, if threads exited when the interpreter does, bad things could happen.

Here’s a working example. Note that C-c takes at most 1 sec to propagate because the sleep duration of the child thread.

#!/usr/bin/env python
from __future__ import print_function

import concurrent.futures
import time
import sys

quit = False
def wait_a_bit(name):
    while not quit:
        print("{n} is doing work...".format(n=name))
        time.sleep(1)

def setup():
    executor = concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=5)
    future1 = executor.submit(wait_a_bit, "Jack")
    future2 = executor.submit(wait_a_bit, "Jill")

    # main thread must be doing "work" to be able to catch a Ctrl+C 
    # http://www.luke.maurits.id.au/blog/post/threads-and-signals-in-python.html
    while (not (future1.done() and future2.done())):
        time.sleep(1)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    try:
        setup()
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        quit = True