What’s a Pthread?

Threads are a generic concept. Wikipedia defines it as:

In computer science, a thread of execution is the smallest sequence of programmed instructions that can be managed independently by an operating system scheduler. A thread is a light-weight process.

Pthreads or POSIX threads are one implementation of that concept used with C program on Unix. Most modern languages have their own implementation of threads. From that web page:

Pthreads are defined as a set of C language programming types and procedure calls, implemented with a pthread.h header/include file and a thread library – though this library may be part of another library, such as libc, in some implementations.

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