Sokszálú

Sokszálú is a Hungarian adjective meaning "many-threaded." In computing, it describes software, systems or architectures capable of executing multiple threads of control concurrently or in an interleaved fashion under a scheduler. A thread is the smallest sequence of programmed instructions that can be managed by the scheduler, sharing the process address space and resources such as memory, file handles, and global data.

A multithreaded program can improve responsiveness and throughput by overlapping I/O with computation or by utilizing multiple CPU cores. This requires careful design to avoid race conditions, ensure thread safety, and prevent deadlocks. Synchronization primitives such as mutexes, semaphores, condition variables, and atomic operations are commonly used to coordinate threads.

There is a distinction between concurrency and parallelism: concurrency refers to managing multiple threads, potentially on a single core; parallelism refers to executing multiple threads at the same time on several cores. In practice, many sokszálú systems aim to achieve parallel execution on multi-core hardware, but performance benefits depend on workload characteristics and synchronization overhead.

Programming languages and platforms offer varying levels of support for sokszálú execution. Java and C# provide built-in threading models; C and C++ offer libraries such as POSIX threads or standard thread support; Python provides threading but is limited by the Global Interpreter Lock for CPU-bound tasks. Operating systems and runtime environments manage thread scheduling and context switching, which incurs overhead.

Applications include servers handling many simultaneous connections, GUI applications that must stay responsive, and computational tasks that can be divided into independent subtasks.