The Path to Parallel JavaScript

#1

Post by leo2urlevan » Thu, Feb 26, 2015, 8:26 PM UTC

The Path to Parallel JavaScript
blog.mozilla.org

Re: The Path to Parallel JavaScript

#2

Post by bhouston » Thu, Feb 26, 2015, 8:34 PM UTC

This is really important work!

Re: The Path to Parallel JavaScript

#3

Post by Zikes » Thu, Feb 26, 2015, 8:44 PM UTC

I would love to see a channel primitive similar to Golang's. They really seem to have hit the nail on the head with that one.

Re: The Path to Parallel JavaScript

#4

Post by leeoniya » Thu, Feb 26, 2015, 9:26 PM UTC

i have always wanted Canvas as well as read-only array buffers (for things like map-reduce image analysis) to be accessible in web workers.

Re: The Path to Parallel JavaScript

#5

Post by amelius » Thu, Feb 26, 2015, 9:32 PM UTC

Great developments, since, imho, we really need multi-threading to make decent user-interfaces (ones without hick-ups due to blocking of the cpu-resource).

I think what we need is immutable data-structures to be shareable between threads. This approach should also allow structural sharing between threads, allowing for efficient and safe data structures.

Also, I could see a use for a mechanism where a thread creates a data-structure, then marks it as read-only, such that it can become shared.

Re: The Path to Parallel JavaScript

#6

Post by jeremiep » Thu, Feb 26, 2015, 9:33 PM UTC

Zikes wrote: post #3

I would love to see a channel primitive similar to Golang's. They really seem to have hit the nail on the head with that one.

Clojure's core.async library works wonders in ClojureScript giving you channel primitives and coroutines.

I've never tried using them across web workers however.

Re: The Path to Parallel JavaScript

#7

Post by noelwelsh » Thu, Feb 26, 2015, 9:39 PM UTC

Zikes wrote: post #3

I would love to see a channel primitive similar to Golang's. They really seem to have hit the nail on the head with that one.

The CSP model is very nice, but I don't think that what this proposal is aiming for. CSP is more about concurrency, while the post makes it clear they are looking at parallelism. This is more addressing "things that appear to be single threaded but run faster" like image analysis, for instance.

Re: The Path to Parallel JavaScript

#8

Post by coding4all » Thu, Feb 26, 2015, 9:45 PM UTC

Zikes wrote: post #3

I would love to see a channel primitive similar to Golang's. They really seem to have hit the nail on the head with that one.

Clojure and ClojureScript have core.async which does a great/better job https://github.com/clojure/core.async/blob/master/examples/w...

There's also a video if you care to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enwIIGzhahw

Re: The Path to Parallel JavaScript

#9

Post by lukasm » Thu, Feb 26, 2015, 9:47 PM UTC

Does anyone know what is the origin of async/await? It's very convenient for simple cases, but it makes it very hard to mix synchronous and async code(C#).

Re: The Path to Parallel JavaScript

#10

Post by coderzach » Thu, Feb 26, 2015, 9:48 PM UTC

lukasm wrote: post #9

Does anyone know what is the origin of async/await? It's very convenient for simple cases, but it makes it very hard to mix synchronous and async code(C#).

How does it make it difficult?