🧵 Thread Lifecycle & Management — The Final Pillar

Welcome to Pillar #9 of the Concurrency & Multithreading: The Ultimate Engineer’s Bible series.

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🧠 Think Like an OS

Threads are not just abstractions; they are contracts with the OS scheduler. Understanding their lifecycle makes you a better performance engineer, not just a better programmer. This is not optional knowledge — it’s foundational.

🔁 Thread Lifecycle

Every thread in Java goes through a predictable journey with 6 well-defined states. Think of it like tracking a package delivery — you always know exactly where it is in the process.

The 6 States:

• NEW — Thread object created, but .start() hasn't been called yet
• RUNNABLE — Thread is ready to run or currently running (JVM handles the details)
• BLOCKED — Thread is stuck waiting to enter a synchronized block/method
• WAITING — Thread is waiting indefinitely for…