What are the main families of threads?

This FAQ originated on Usenet in the early-to-mid 1990s; it survives here mainly for historical curiosity rather than as a source of current best practices.

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.