Java™ Language Specification, Third Edition, The

Chapter 17. Threads and Locks

	And oft-times in the most forbidding denOf solitude, with love of science strong,How patiently the yoke of thought they bear;How subtly glide its finest threads along!
	--William Wordsworth, Monks and Schoolmen, in Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822)

While most of the discussion in the preceding chapters is concerned only with the behavior of code as executed a single statement or expression at a time, that is, by a single thread, each Java virtual machine can support many threads of execution at once. These threads independently execute code that operates on values and objects residing in a shared main memory. Threads may be supported by having many hardware processors, by time-slicing a single hardware processor, or by ...