Eclipse's JUnit test runner forcibly terminates threads

Today I was writing a unit test which instantiated a class, which started a thread to do some stuff. I was hoping to test the side effect of that thread. However, to my surprise, I realized that Eclipse would forcibly terminate the test after the test method exited, even before the thread completed it's work.

I wrote a simple test to show this.

import com.sun.org.apache.xpath.internal.operations.And;
import junit.framework.TestCase;
import junit.textui.TestRunner;

/**
 * This class shows that Eclipse's JUnit test case runner will forcibly terminate 
 * the JVM and all running threads
 */
public class ThreadTest extends TestCase {
 
  static Runnable run = new Runnable() {
    public void run() {
      int cnt = 0;
      while(true) System.out.println(cnt++);
    }
  };
 
  public void testThread() {
    Thread t = new Thread(run);
    t.start();
  }
 
  public static void main(String args[]) {
    TestRunner runner = new TestRunner();
    runner.run(ThreadTest.class);
  }
}

This class basically starts a Thread which prints an increasing count in an infinite while loop. When I run this class as a unit test from Eclipse, the count is printed till about 1890 and then the thread terminates. However, when I run the main method (which runs the unit test using JUnit's TestRunner) then the test runs as expected.

I actually added the main method to eliminate the doubt that JUnit might be terminating the thread. I know this is unlikely, but I just wanted to be sure.

I just find it strange that this is the first time I have run into this issue. Especially after working for so many years with Eclipse. I find it hard to believe that I have never written a test case which started a thread and had to wait for it to do something. Or maybe this is a bug in the latest version of Eclipse (3.4.2).

For now I have worked around this issue by putting the main thread to sleep till a property indicating that that the thread has completed it's work is set.