Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by 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).
2 comments
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.
link
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.
link
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...

link