[whatwg] Web Workers

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Ryan Heise wrote:
> 
> [...] For all of the reasons above, I would like to see something like 
> threads in Javascript. Yes, threads give rise to race conditions and 
> deadlocks, but this seems to be in line with Javascript's apparent 
> philosophy of doing very little static error checking, and letting 
> things just happen at runtime (e.g. nonexistent static type system). In 
> other words, this may be simply a case of: yes, javascript allows 
> runtime errors to happen. Is not allowing deadlocks important enough 
> that we should make it impossible for a certain class of algorithms to 
> exploit multi-core CPUs?

Generally speaking, the thinking on these topics is basically that we 
should try to avoid allowing authors to do anything that is hard to debug. 
Threads in particular are _incredibly_ complicated to work with even for 
very experienced programmers.

Having said that, this is the kind of thing that begins with experimental 
implementations, and then migrate to the standardisation process once they 
are proven. This is indeed how Workers started (first Google experimented 
with this area in Gears, and then the experience from that work informed 
the standardisation process). I recommend working with browser vendors to 
experiment in this area.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'