THREADWAIT Wait on a thread to complete execution

Section: FreeMat Threads

Usage

The threadwait function waits for the given thread to complete execution, and stops execution of the current thread (the one calling threadwait) until the given thread completes. The syntax for its use is 
   success = threadwait(handle)

where handle is the value returned by threadnew and success is a logical vaariable that will be 1 if the wait was successful or 0 if the wait times out. By default, the wait is indefinite. It is better to use the following form of the function 

   success = threadwait(handle,timeout)

where timeout is the amount of time (in milliseconds) for the threadwait function to wait before a timeout occurs. If the threadwait function succeeds, then the return value is a logical 1, and if it fails, the return value is a logical 0. Note that you can call threadwait multiple times on a thread, and if the thread is completed, each one will succeed.

Example

Here we lauch the sleep function in a thread with a time delay of 10 seconds. This means that the thread function will not complete until 10 seconds have elapsed. When we call threadwait on this thread with a short timeout, it fails, but not when the timeout is long enough to capture the end of the function call. 
--> a = threadnew;
--> threadstart(a,'sleep',0,10);  % start a thread that will sleep for 10
--> threadwait(a,2000)            % 2 second wait is not long enough

ans = 
 0 

--> threadwait(a,10000)           % 10 second wait is long enough

ans = 
 1 

--> threadfree(a)