Interview Questions

A process is an independent program with its own memory space; threads are lighter units of execution that share their process's memory. Threads are cheaper to create and communicate, but shared memory requires synchronization to avoid race conditions.

The Global Interpreter Lock allows only one thread to execute Python bytecode at a time, simplifying memory management but limiting CPU-bound multithreading. Use multiprocessing or native extensions for CPU parallelism; threads still help with I/O-bound work.