Java 9 Concurrency Cookbook - Second Edition

Creating and running a daemon thread

Java has a special kind of thread called daemon thread. When daemon threads are the only threads running in a program, the JVM ends the program after finishing these threads.

With these characteristics, daemon threads are normally used as service providers for normal (also called user) threads running in the same program. They usually have an infinite loop that waits for the service request or performs the tasks of a thread. A typical example of these kinds of threads is the Java garbage collector.

In this recipe, we will learn how to create a daemon thread by developing an example with two threads: one user thread that would write events on a queue and a daemon thread that would clean the queue, removing ...