Notice that the documentation for close says:

> Indicate that no more data will be put on this queue by the current process. The background thread will quit once it has flushed all buffered data to the pipe. This is called automatically when the queue is garbage collected.

The method does not promise to close any pipe, just "Indicate that no more data will be put on this queue by the current process". Closing prematurely the writer side could lead to issues. I still do not understand why you would want to close the pipes but maintain the queue alive.

I could be missing something, so let's see if other people think differently about this.