What is the difference between a process and a thread

Posted by James Fassett on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by James Fassett
Published on 2008-10-14T09:13:24Z Indexed on 2010/03/19 14:21 UTC
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multithreading

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process

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semantics

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difference

What is the technical difference between a process and a thread? I get the feeling a word like 'process' is over used and there is also hardware and software threads. How about light-weight processes in languages like Erlang? Is there a definitive reason to use one term over the other?

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