[whatwg] Web Sockets

[Brady Eidson]

On Jul 7, 2008, at 12:57 PM, Mike Ter Louw wrote:

> Ian Hickson wrote:
>> Bringing in Apache as a library is a serious cost compared to  
>> WebSocket whose handshake can be implemented in a dozen lines of  
>> perl.
>
> Careful, there are probably someone out there that will take this as  
> a challenge to implement Apache in a dozen lines of Perl!  :P
>
> Joking aside, should a blocking read/recv call be made available?   
> In some cases additional lag may be an acceptable compromise for  
> maintaining the JavaScript call stack until a response arrives.

My personal take (and the take of most of the people I work with) is  
that blocking i/o on the main thread should be out of the question.

No matter what assumptions, guarantees, or compromises are understood  
in a rationalization for allowing it, we've seen time and time again  
that they backfire and lead to poor user experiences and bad  
performance problems.

Notice I'm explicitly mentioning the main thread - if we get a clear,  
clean spec for worker threads and we restrict blocking i/o to such  
worker threads, then sure - go for it!

~Brady