How do processes within an operating system interact and what are execution threads?

Processes in an operating system are isolated instances of programs that have their own address space and resources. They interact with each other through inter-process communication (IPC) mechanisms such as channels, message queues, sockets, or shared memory.

Threads are lighter-weight units within a process that share the same address space and resources of the process but have their own stack and registers. Threads allow multiple tasks to be executed concurrently within a single process, improving application performance and responsiveness.

For example, in Go, goroutines are lightweight threads managed by the language runtime that enable efficient execution of many tasks simultaneously.