| Concept | Isolated? | Runs in Parallel? | Memory Sharing | Managed By | Lightweight? | Ideal For |
|---|
| Process | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes (true parallelism) | ❌ No (isolated memory) | Operating System | ❌ No | Heavy, separate tasks |
| Thread | ❌ No | ✅ Yes (true parallelism) | ✅ Yes (shared memory) | Operating System | ⚠️ Moderate | Concurrent subtasks |
| Coroutine | ❌ No | ❌ No (cooperative multitasking) | ✅ Yes (same memory) | Language Runtime | ✅ Yes | Async I/O, lightweight concurrency |
Use Cases
| Use Case | Use Processes 🏢 | Use Threads 🧵 | Use Coroutines 🌀 |
|---|
| Heavy CPU-bound computation | ✅ Yes | ⚠️ Maybe (GIL limits in some languages) | ❌ No (not designed for CPU) |
| Independent tasks (isolated memory) | ✅ Yes | ❌ No | ❌ No |
| Shared memory between tasks | ❌ Complex | ✅ Easy | ✅ Easy (same memory) |
| I/O-bound tasks (API, file, DB) | ❌ Overkill | ✅ Good | ✅ Best (lightweight) |
| High number of tasks (1000+) | ❌ Memory-heavy | ⚠️ Depends | ✅ Excellent (cheap to spawn) |
| Multicore parallelism | ✅ Best choice | ⚠️ Depends on language GIL | ❌ Not for true parallelism |
| Real-time responsiveness | ⚠️ Slow startup | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes (esp. async I/O) |