Can I execute two functions at the same time?

Question

I am new to programming. I know that a computer executes instructions in the order they are given.

I'm learning C and I wrote this:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int comp(const char *a, const char *b) {
  return *a - *b;
}

int main() {
  char str[] = "Hello, world! I'm learning C and it's awesome!";
  qsort(str, sizeof(str) - 1, sizeof(char), comp); // -1 because of NUL-terminator.
  puts(str);
  return 0;
}

However, when I want to sort multiple very large arrays, this can take a while. My computer has multiple processing cores so I want to take advantage of that. Is that possible? Can code run in parallel and how would I do that?

---

^{_{P.S. I know I have to profile the code before optimizing it, but for now assume this is a very slow operation.}}

Answer 1

What you're looking for is called threading. There are a great many resources and tutorials out there on the Internet to get you started with parallelizing code.