Difference between Process and Thread

Process

• An executing instance of a program is called a process.
• Some operating systems use the term ‘task‘ to refer to a program that is being executed.
• A process is always stored in the main memory also termed as the primary memory or random access memory.
• Therefore, a process is termed as an active entity. It disappears if the machine is rebooted.
• Several process may be associated with a same program.
• On a multiprocessor system, multiple processes can be executed in parallel.
• On a uni-processor system, though true parallelism is not achieved, a process scheduling algorithm is applied and the processor is scheduled to execute each process one at a time yielding an illusion of concurrency.
• Example: Executing multiple instances of the ‘Calculator’ program. Each of the instances are termed as a process.

Thread

• A thread is a subset of the process.
• It is termed as a ‘lightweight process’, since it is similar to a real process but executes within the context of a process and shares the same resources allotted to the process by the kernel (See kquest.co.cc/2010/03/operating-system for more info on the term ‘kernel’).
• Usually, a process has only one thread of control – one set of machine instructions executing at a time.
• A process may also be made up of multiple threads of execution that execute instructions concurrently.
• Multiple threads of control can exploit the true parallelism possible on multiprocessor systems.
• On a uni-processor system, a thread scheduling algorithm is applied and the processor is scheduled to run each thread one at a time.
• All the threads running within a process share the same address space, file descriptor, stack and other process related attributes.
• Since the threads of a process share the same memory, synchronizing the access to the shared data withing the process gains unprecedented importance.

What is Java thread

A thread is a thread of execution in a program. The Java Virtual Machine allows an application to have multiple threads of execution running concurrently.

Every thread has a priority. Threads with higher priority are executed in preference to threads with lower priority. Each thread may or may not also be marked as a daemon. When code running in some thread creates a new Thread object, the new thread has its priority initially set equal to the priority of the creating thread, and is a daemon thread if and only if the creating thread is a daemon.

Difference between “implements Runnable” and “extends Thread” in java

In java language, as we all know that there are two ways to create threads. One using Runnable interface and another by extending Thread class.

There has been a good amount of debate on which is better way. Well, I also tried to find out and below is my learning:

1) Implementing Runnable is the preferred way to do it. Here, you’re not really specializing or modifying the thread’s behavior. You’re just giving the thread something to run. That means composition is the better way to go.

2) Java only supports single inheritance, so you can only extend one class.

3) Instantiating an interface gives a cleaner separation between your code and the implementation of threads.

4) Implementing Runnable makes your class more flexible. If you extend thread then the action you’re doing is always going to be in a thread. However, if you extend Runnable it doesn’t have to be. You can run it in a thread, or pass it to some kind of executor service, or just pass it around as a task within a single threaded application.

5) By extending Thread, each of your threads has a unique object associated with it, whereas implementing Runnable, many threads can share the same runnable instance.

6) If you are working on JDK 4 or lesser, then there is bug :