What is the difference between pthread and thread?

Answer 1

Answer POSIX threads are fairly portable. They can be emulated on uniprocessor systems at a slight (or sometimes no) penalty in speed. On shared memory multiprocessor machines, there is often kernel support for threads; this means that your application can take full advantage of all available CPUs and achieve (near) maximum performance. It is important to point out that threads libraries are predicated on shared memory. Threads won't help you on distributed memory machines Preeti

Answer 2

A task, also known as a process in the Unix/Linux world, is typically a program that issues the fork() system call to fork a copy of itself (referred to as spawning a child process) that is an identical copy of the parent but will typically begin execution inside a subroutine that the parent itself never executes. One example of such a program is the Apache web server daemon "httpd", which supports a user configurable number of child processes.

A threaded program is a program that does not need to fork() a copy of itself in the same manner as a self forking program. Instead, the program supports multiple threads of execution within itself. While there is some controversy among some programmers between the various advantages of one or the other of these methodologies, in practice both are well supported, efficient and widely used. It often is little more than a matter of personal preference over which is used in a given program. [JMH]