how is a thread different from a process?

A process is an instance of a program that is executing, whereas a thread is a unit of execution within a process. A process may contain multiple threads, and each thread can run concurrently with other threads within the same process.

The main difference between a process and a thread is that a process has its own memory space and system resources, whereas threads share the same memory space and system resources within a process. This means that threads can communicate with each other more efficiently than processes, but also makes them more vulnerable to crashes and other errors since they share resources.

In general, processes are used to run multiple independent programs, while threads are used to improve the performance of a single program by parallelizing its execution.