implementing while loop termination in a multithreaded Python application
Hey everyone, I'm running into an issue that's driving me crazy. I've been banging my head against this for hours. I'm running into a question with a while loop that doesn't seem to terminate as expected in my Python multithreaded application using the `threading` module. I have a separate thread that is supposed signal when the loop should stop, but it doesn't appear to be working consistently. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```python import threading import time # A global stop flag stop_loop = False # Worker function for the thread def worker(): global stop_loop time.sleep(2) # Simulating some work stop_loop = True # Signal to stop the loop # Main function with while loop def main(): global stop_loop thread = threading.Thread(target=worker) thread.start() while not stop_loop: print('Loop is running...') time.sleep(1) # Simulating processing time print('Loop has been terminated.') main() ``` When I run this code, I expect the output to show 'Loop is running...' for about 2 seconds, followed by 'Loop has been terminated.', but occasionally, I see the loop continues to run longer than anticipated. Sometimes it even prints multiple termination messages. I suspect it's a timing scenario between main thread and the worker thread, but I'm not sure how to ensure a clean exit. I've tried adding locks, but it hasn't resolved the scenario. Can anyone explain what might be happening here and how I can fix it? My development environment is macOS. What am I doing wrong? This is part of a larger service I'm building. Am I missing something obvious? I'm using Python 3.9 in this project. Thanks for any help you can provide!