What is the difference between a process and a thread?

Question

What is the technical difference between a process and a thread?

I get the feeling a word like \'process\' is overused and there are also hardware and software threa

Answer 1

To explain more with respect to concurrent programming

1. A process has a self-contained execution environment. A process generally has a complete, private set of basic run-time resources; in particular, each process has its own memory space.

2. Threads exist within a process — every process has at least one. Threads share the process's resources, including memory and open files. This makes for efficient, but potentially problematic, communication.

An example keeping the average person in mind:

On your computer, open Microsoft Word and a web browser. We call these two processes.

In Microsoft Word, you type something and it gets automatically saved. Now, you have observed editing and saving happens in parallel - editing on one thread and saving on the other thread.