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by robbies 3165 days ago
Modern game engines parcel out work via a job system, where functional tasks are dispatched to the cores in a system. This is opposed to the idea of 'one core/thread will own a task for the lifetime of the application, while checking in with a master core/thread'. Actually, most games have a hybrid model. Usually one thread/core is dedicated to rendering, another thread/core is dedicated to high priority tasks/jobs, and then the remaining resources are used by whatever jobs are left.

http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3_bfg/threading.php
1 comments
iainmerrick 3165 days ago
That threading style potentially fits OK with the JS "Web Worker" / "isolate" model, as long as you can pass messages around between threads/isolates very efficiently (probably not the case in current JS implementations).
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TheHegemon 3165 days ago
There are Transferable objects (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Transferabl...) so you at least don't have to serialize the data between workers.
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robbies 3164 days ago
Oh interesting. TBH, I have zero knowledge on how to do any of this on the web side. All my experience is from working with traditional game engines on the native side.
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mhink 3164 days ago
The worker pooling system you describe is eminently possible in the browser these days. Web Workers [1] are really just threads with a JS execution context and a facility for messaging back to the thread which created them. (Or, if you set them up with a MessageChannel [2], they can do full-duplex messaging with any thread that gets the other end of the pipe)

Of course, you're still dealing with the event loop in most cases, which is probably a stumbling block when it comes to really low-level stuff. That said, there are even facilities for shared memory and atomics operations [3] these days, which helps. I've messed around with it a little bit on a side project- as a JS developer, it's really weird and fun to say "screw the event loop!" and just enter an endless synchronous loop. :D

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Worker [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MessageChan... [3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

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