- In the vernacular, a repeatable activity or repeatable set of interrelated activities that collectively create a set of one or more outputs from a set of one or more inputs.
- A set (which may, or may not, include parallelization) of steps (tasks or logical instructions) not necessarily having a defined, internally managed set of terminating criteria. Unlike an algorithm, a process can go on forever until somebody shoots it. Good developmental practices are algorithms in this sense…not processes.
- In computers, a process is an instance of some executable software, running on a computer. Processes typically have an image, which may have been loaded from permanent storage by an OS, and control a memory space, also possibly allocated by the OS.
A single machine can host more than one process at the same time, a condition known as multi-tasking. The processes might, or might not, be “aware” of each others’ existence, and might (or might not) communicate between each other. If they do, then they might (or might not) use features of the OS in support of that communication.