Is this an acceptable idiom for NSThread in Objective-C?

Question

I have a small agent-based modeling-framework that I'm writing as part of a project. The different agents all run in their own threads and a supervisor class controls their lifecycles. So the supervisor class can cancel these threads. I know that there is an isCancelled method on NSThread . Using that, is the following idiom acceptable:

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#import "BugThread.h"
#import "Bug.h"

@implementation BugThread

- (id) initWithBug: (Bug*) aBug {

    if((self = [super init])) {
        [bug autorelease];
        bug = [aBug retain];
    }

    return self;
}

- (void) main {

    GSRegisterCurrentThread();

    while(![self isCancelled]) {
        //bug does its stuff
    }
}

Answer 1

I would say so, since this is explicitly stated in the docs :

If your thread supports cancellation, it should call this method periodically and exit if it ever returns YES.

I'd recommend that you take a look at NSOperation and NSOperationQueue , though. They're intended to allow exactly this kind of concurrency while managing the actual threads on your behalf. See "Operation Queues" in the Concurrency Programming Guide.