Process and Thread: For my sophomore

Yash: What is a process?

Me: Let me think.

Yash: Also what is Thread?

Me: Now you are making things simpler.

Yash: How?

Me: Let us start from scratch. In computers, a program has two characteristics. It has some memory space (contiguous memory locations) and instructions to be executed by processor. So process is a thing which has its own memory space and instructions to be executed. No two processes share memory space. Each process has its own memory space.

Yash: So you mean to say, if I have two processes are running in a computer, both have its own non sharing memory space at a given point of time.

Me: Yes.

Yash: Now what is thread?

Me: Not it is tricky. If you consider a process as a set - remember your eight grade mathematics, and then threads are sub set of process set. It means threads run within memory space of a process and even threads can share memory space.

Yash: I can draw this into a picture.

Me: Try it.

Yash: so this is my understanding.

   

Me: Excellent.