An application should catch instances of this class only if it must clean up after being terminated asynchronously. If ThreadDeath is caught by a method, it is important that it be rethrown so that the thread actually dies.

The top-level error handler does not print out a message if ThreadDeath is never caught.

The class ThreadDeath is specifically a subclass of Error rather than Exception, even though it is a "normal occurrence", because many applications catch all occurrences of Exception and then discard the exception.