7.9.1 Abolishing shared tables

This section briefly explains the interaction between deleting shared tables and running threads. The core rule is that abolishing a shared table has no effect on the semantics of the tabled predicates. An attempt to abolish an incomplete table results in the table to be marked for destruction on completion. The thread that is completing the table continues to do so and continues execution with the computed table answers. Any other thread blocks, waiting for the table to complete. Once completed, the table is destroyed and the waiting threads see a fresh table^{170Future versions may avoid waiting by converting the abolished shared table to a private table.}.

The current implementation never reclaims shared tables. Instead, they remain part of the global variant table and only the answers of the shared table are reclaimed. Future versions may garbage collect such tables. See also abolish_shared_tables/0.