What is the difference between a Process and a Thread? (Variant 8)
AI Interviewer Insight
A process is an executing instance of an application with its own memory space. A thread is a path of execution within a process. Threads share the same memory space of their parent process, making context switching between threads faster than processes.
Strong Answer
"A process is an isolated execution environment. If one process crashes, it usually doesn't affect others. Threads live within a process and share resources like memory and file handles. This makes threads lighter and faster to create, but if one thread crashes, it can take down the whole process."
Poor Answer
"A thread is just a smaller process."
Common Pitfalls
- •Confusing multi-processing with multi-threading
- •Forgetting that threads share memory
Likely Follow-Up Questions
What is a race condition?
How do you prevent deadlocks in multithreading?
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