Why is Thread.stop deprecated?

Thread.stop is being deprecated because it is inherently unsafe. Stopping a thread causes it to unlock all the monitors that it has locked. (The monitors are unlocked as the ThreadDeath exception propagates up the stack.) If any of the objects previously protected by these monitors was in an inconsistent state, other threads might view these objects in an inconsistent state. Such objects are said to be damaged .

Threads operating on damaged objects can behave arbitrarily, either obviously or not. Unlike other unchecked exceptions, ThreadDeath kills threads silently; thus, the user has no warning that the program might be corrupted. The corruption can manifest itself at any time after the actual damage occurs, even hours or days in the future.

Couldn't I just catch the ThreadDeath exception and fix the damaged object?

In theory, perhaps, but it would vastly complicate the task of writing correct multithreaded code.

The task would be nearly insurmountable for two reasons:

1. A thread can throw a ThreadDeath exception almost anywhere. All synchronized methods and blocks would have to be studied in great detail, with this in mind.

2. A thread can throw a second ThreadDeath exception while cleaning up from the first (in the catch or finally clause). Cleanup would have to repeated till it succeeded. The code to ensure this would be quite complex.

In sum, it just isn't practical.

So how can we stop a thread safely? In general:

To make the thread stop, we organize for the run() method to exit.

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/concurrency/threadPrimitiveDeprecation.html