Can your ideas about multithreading be misleading, creating an illusion of parallel work?

Yes, notions of multithreading can be misleading, creating the illusion of parallel execution, especially on single-core systems. In such cases, the operating system uses a scheduler to quickly switch between threads (time-sharing), which appears as simultaneous execution, but in reality, threads are executed sequentially, one after another.

Furthermore, without proper synchronization and understanding of the memory model, one might mistakenly think that threads operate in parallel and safely exchange data, which can lead to race conditions and errors.

Example: on a single-processor system, two threads can take turns executing, creating the illusion of parallelism, but they are not actually executing simultaneously.