[whatwg] Worker feedback

[Robert O'Callahan]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 6:35 AM, Jeremy Orlow <jorlow at google.com> wrote:

> If I understood the discussion correctly, the spec for document.cookie
> never stated anything about it being immutable while a script is running.


Well, there never was a decent spec for document.cookie for most of its
life, and even if there had been, no implementations allowed asynchronous
changes to cookies while a script was running (except for maybe during
alert()) and no-one really thought about it. Was this even identified as a
possible issue during Chrome development?

People are now talking about specifying this, but there's been push back.
> Also, there's no way to guarantee serializability for the network traffic
> portion so I'm guessing (hoping!) that this wouldn't be required in the
> JavaScript side, even if it went through.


What exactly do you mean by that? It's easy to guarantee that reading the
cookies to send with an HTTP request is an atomic operation, and writing
them as a result of an HTTP response is an atomic operation.

The spec is written in such a way that you can't have more that one event
> loop per browser window/worker, and everything is essentially tied to this
> one event loop.  In other words, each window/worker can't run on more than
> one CPU core at a time.  Thus, the only way for a web application to scale
> in todays world is going to be through additional windows and/or workers.
>

Depending on exactly what you mean by a "Web application", that's not really
true. There are a variety of ways to exploit multicore parallelism within a
window with the current set of specs, at least in principle.

Rob
-- 
"He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are
healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his
own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all." [Isaiah
53:5-6]
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