A Gentle Introduction to Multithreading

Unlike processes, threads share the same chunk of memory assigned to their parent process by the operating system: data in the media player main interface can be easily accessed by the audio engine and vice versa. For this reason operating systems have developed advanced techniques to give the user the ability to running multiple processes (or threads) at once, especially on graphical environments, even on a single core machine. So if your CPU has only one core, part of a operating system’s job is to spread that single core computing power across multiple processes or threads, which are executed one after the other in a loop.

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