posted 21 years ago
A thread shares its memory space with all other threads living inside the same process. On one hand, this makes it easy for threads to interact with each other as they can simply share data (objects). On the other, if a thread crashes badly it can easily take all other threads down with it. Because threads share so many resources with other threads inside the same process, they are relatively lightweight.
A process is isolated as much as possible from other processes by the operating system. In particular processes cannot access each others' memory (although there exists a shared memory facility through which processes can share data). Each process has its owner, security permissions, etc. Processes are considered heavyweight because they are generally expensive to create.
- Peter
[ April 07, 2002: Message edited by: Peter den Haan ]
Peter den Haan | peterdenhaan.com | quantum computing specialist, Objectivity Ltd