Pthreads
Pthreads (POSIX Threads) is a standardized C library for multithreading, providing APIs to create, manage, and synchronize threads in Unix-like operating systems. It enables concurrent execution of tasks within a single process, improving performance for parallelizable workloads. The library is part of the POSIX standard, ensuring portability across compliant systems.
Developers should learn Pthreads when building high-performance applications on Unix-like systems that require fine-grained control over threading, such as real-time systems, servers, or scientific computing. It's essential for scenarios where low-level thread management, synchronization primitives like mutexes and condition variables, and portability across POSIX-compliant platforms are critical, though it's more complex than higher-level alternatives.