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A state machine is a technique. It is not language-dependent.

There might be libraries to encapsulate the mechanics of state machines -- I don't know, though, because I find the mechanics of creating them easy enough that I never felt the need to seek out a library to support them.

I'd recommend reading up about them on the web. Here's a reasonable start: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/state-machines-basics-of-c...

In their purest form, though, state machines are very simple. You have a conceptual "state" represented by a variable, then what amounts to a series of if-then statements (or a switch statement like in C/C++). The state machine consists of a loop, each iteration checking the current state (1, 2, 3, etc.) and performing the actions associated with that state. Then the state is changed as appropriate and the loop continues.

So you have something like "If the state is "Starting", then do initialization things and change the state variable to "Running". If the state is "Running", do some business logic. If it's time to quit, change the state to "Stopping". If the state is "Stopping", free up resources and stop execution."




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