Threads in the Win32 API

The multithreaded process structure of the Win32 API opens up powerful and elegant solutions to high-end applications. Each thread within a process has its own stack and machine state. On multiprocessor systems with the Windows NT operating system, multiple threads can execute at the same time but on different processors. Applications that need to perform intensive processing, I/O, and so on, can do this in the background using threads and still offer a responsive user interface.