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Asked: 2026-06-13T03:23:31+00:00

I am making an application in C that depends on asynchronous method calls. In

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I am making an application in C that depends on asynchronous method calls. In my best efforts thus far to make it cross platform I am currently implementing code that looks like this:

#ifdef TARGET_WINDOWS
//Windows threading API
#else
//pthreads API
#endif

I appreciate there is probably a better way to do that but that is not the point of my question. My question is, what will happen to the program on a single-core processor? Will the threads still execute asynchronously (interleaved instructions perhaps), or am I stuck with single-thread execution only on single-core CPUs?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    At the end of the day a single core can only run one thread at a time. The thread scheduler will interrupt the running thread and give another thread the chance to run for the specified quantum.

    Now what happens exactly is up to the OS. But should all your work be CPU bound, maybe some intensive calculations then the overall performance may in fact degrade with more threads due to the cost of context switching. But if you are waiting on I/O for example, the OS can schedule another thread to run in the meantime to make use of CPU.

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