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copied!<p>main() is the entry point for your program. C++ (current C++ anyway) doesn't know what a process or thread is. The word 'process' is not even in the index of the standard. What happens before and after main() is mostly implementation defined. So, the answer to your question is also implementation defined.</p> <p>In general though most operating systems have the concept of process and thread and they have similar meanings (though in Linux, for example, a thread is actually a "light weight process"). You can generally assume that your program will be started in a new process and that main() will then be called by the original thread after the implementation defined initialization. </p> <p>Since there's plenty of room for the implementation and/or you to start up a whole bunch of threads before main is called though you will probably generally want to consider main() to have been called during the execution of a thread. The best way to think about it though is probably in terms of the standard unless you really have to think about the implementation. The standard doesn't currently know what a process or thread is. C++0x will change that in some way but I'm not sure at this point what the new concepts will be or how they will relate to OS specific constructs.</p> <p>My answer is specifically addressed at the C++ language part of the question. C is a different language and I haven't used it in a good 10 years so I forget how the globals initialization is specified.</p>

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