What is Thread?
A thread identifies a single control flow, which is a logical sequence of instructions, within a process. By logical sequence of instructions, we mean a sequence of instructions that have been designed to be executed one after the other one. More commonly, a thread identifies a kind of yarn that is used for sewing, and the feeling of continuity that is expressed by the interlocked fibers of that yarn is used to recall the concept that the instructions of thread express a logically continuous sequence of operations.
Operating systems that support multithreading identify threads as the minimal building blocks for expressing running code. This means that, despite their explicit use by developers, any sequence of instruction that is executed by the operating system is within the context of a thread. As a consequence, each process contains at least one thread but, in several cases, is composed of many threads having variable lifetimes. Threads within the same process share the memory space and the execution context; besides this, there is no substantial difference between threads belonging to different processes.
In a multitasking environment the operating system assigns different time slices to each process and interleaves their execution. The process of temporarily stopping the execution of one process, saving all the information in the registers (and in general the state of the CPU in order to restore it later), and replacing it with the information related to another process is known as a context switch.
This operation is generally considered demanding, and the use of multithreading minimizes the latency imposed by context switches, thus allowing the execution of multiple tasks in a lighter fashion. The state representing the execution of a thread is minimal compared to the one describing a process. Therefore, switching between threads is a preferred practice over switching between processes. Obviously the use of multiple threads in place of multiple processes is justified if and only if the tasks implemented are logically related to each other and require sharing memory or other resources. If this is not the case, a better design is provided by separating them into different processes.
Figure below provides an overview of the relation between threads and processes and a simplified representation of the runtime execution of a multithreaded application. A running program is identified by a process, which contains at least one thread, also called the main thread. Such a thread is implicitly created by the compiler or the runtime environment executing the program. This thread is likely to last for the entire lifetime of the process and be the rigin of other threads, which in general exhibit a shorter duration. As main threads, these threads can spawn other threads. There is no difference between the main thread and other threads created during the process lifetime. Each of them has its own local storage and a sequence of instructions to execute, and they all share the memory space allocated for the entire process. The execution of the process is considered terminated when all the threads are completed.
