What are the main families of threads?
June 9th, 2005 by Bryan O'Sullivan
If you are talking about “mainstream” systems programming languages on popular operating systems, there are three main families of threads.
- POSIX-style threads, which generally run on Unix systems
- Microsoft-style threads, which generally run on Windows systems
- Java threads, which are specific to the Java language, but run on a variety of operating systems
Other software systems have their own ways of handling threads and concurrency. They are too numerous to cover, but here are a few links to the threading systems of popular cross-platform software systems.
- The Perl programming language has a threads package.
- The Python programming language has a threading package.
- The Qt cross-platform windowing system has its own thread system.
- The Ruby programming language has a thread class.
