Detaching a thread started from function called in Python

[jacopoabramo]

Howdy, I'm getting started to use pybind11 for a project that involves controlling a camera that should stream data to disk while being able to interface via a Python application. The camera I'm currently working on supports multithreading when it comes to retrieving images from the queue (created by the camera library in the background), so my idea was to spawn a thread from a Python call, detaching it and then using mutexes to keep track of the ongoing operation.

I'm more interested on the first problem: is it safe to call from Python a function that detaches a thread?

Minimal example:

#include <pybind11/pybind11.h>
#include <thread>
#include <stdio.h>

void print_thread(int seconds)
{
	printf("Thread sleeping for %d seconds\n", seconds);
	std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::seconds(seconds));
	printf("Thread woke up\n");
}

void start_thread()
{
	printf("Starting thread\n");
	std::thread(print_thread, 5).detach();
}

namespace py = pybind11;

PYBIND11_MODULE(threaded_module, module) {
	module.doc() = "threaded_module";

	module.def("start_thread", &start_thread);
}

And then in python it would be something like:

import threaded_module
threaded_module.start_thread()

I tested this locally and it seems to work, but considering the disclaimer related to the GIL in the Python documentation I'm afraid I may not see a future problem when related to what I want to achieve.