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Explore how to use semaphores in Ruby to solve the bounded buffer producer-consumer problem. Understand coordinating producer and consumer threads with semaphores and how to use a binary semaphore as a mutex to protect critical sections. This lesson provides hands-on experience with multi-threaded synchronization in Ruby concurrency.
We'll cover the following...
Semaphore Implementation
We can also implement the bounded buffer problem using a semaphore. Since Ruby's core library doesn't have a semaphore, we'll use the semaphore implementation from the previous lesson. Let's revisit our CountingSemaphore's constructor. It takes in the maximum number of permits. We can use two semaphores, one semConsumer and the other semProducer. The trick is to initialize semProducer semaphore with the maximum queue capacity of N. This allows producer threads to enqueue N items in the queue. However, the semProducere is only released/incremented by a consumer thread whenever it consumes an item. If there are no ...