Thread creation and execution in Ruby - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Thread creation and execution

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple Ruby program that uses threads to run tasks at the same time. This helps your program do multiple things without waiting for one to finish before starting another.

🎯 Goal: Create and run threads in Ruby to print messages concurrently.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a thread with a block of code

Start the thread

Use Thread.new to create threads

Use join to wait for threads to finish

Print messages from threads

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Threads let programs do many things at once, like downloading files while showing progress or handling multiple users in a chat app.

💼 Career

Understanding threads is important for jobs involving concurrent programming, improving app performance, and working with real-time systems.

1

Create a thread that prints a message

Create a thread called thread1 using Thread.new that prints the message "Hello from thread 1" inside the thread block.

Ruby

# Create a thread called thread1 that prints "Hello from thread 1"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use Thread.new do ... end to create a thread and put puts inside the block.

2

Create a second thread with a different message

Create a second thread called thread2 using Thread.new that prints the message "Hello from thread 2" inside the thread block.

Ruby

thread1 = Thread.new do
  puts "Hello from thread 1"
end
# Create a thread called thread2 that prints "Hello from thread 2"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the same pattern as thread1 but change the variable name and message.

3

Wait for both threads to finish

Use the join method on both thread1 and thread2 to make sure the main program waits for both threads to complete.

Ruby

thread1 = Thread.new do
  puts "Hello from thread 1"
end

thread2 = Thread.new do
  puts "Hello from thread 2"
end

# Wait for thread1 and thread2 to finish
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Call join on each thread variable to wait for them.

4

Print a final message after threads complete

Add a puts statement after joining the threads to print "Both threads have finished".

Ruby

thread1 = Thread.new do
  puts "Hello from thread 1"
end

thread2 = Thread.new do
  puts "Hello from thread 2"
end

thread1.join
thread2.join

# Print "Both threads have finished" here
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use puts "Both threads have finished" after the join calls.