Basic asynchronous programming with threads

To utilize threading, we need to be able to start threads, allow them to run, and then join them. We can see the stages of practically managing our threads in the following diagram:

Figure 3.4 – Stages of threads

We start the threads, we then let them run, and once they have run, we join them. If we did not join them, the program would continue to run before the threads had finished. In Python, we create a thread by inheriting the Thread object, as follows:

from threading import Thread 
from time import sleep
from typing import Optional
class ExampleThread(Thread):
    
    def __init__(self, seconds: int, name: str) -> None:
        super().__init__()
        self.seconds: int = seconds
        self.name: str = name
    ...