Virtual thread

In computer programming, a virtual thread is a thread that is managed by a runtime library or virtual machine (VM) and made to resemble "real" operating system thread to code executing on it, while requiring substantially fewer resources than the latter.

Not to be confused with green thread.

Virtual threads allows for tens of millions of preemptive tasks and events on a 2021 consumer-grade computer, compared to low thousands of operating system threads. Preemptive execution is important to performance gains through parallelism and fast preemptive response times for tens of millions of events.

Earlier constructs that are not or not always preemptive, such as coroutines, green threads or the largely single-threaded Node.js, introduce delays in responding to asynchronous events such as every incoming request in a server application.

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