[whatwg] Canvas in workers

[Robert O'Callahan]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 2:20 PM, Kenneth Russell <kbr at google.com> wrote:

> Would you mind looking at the proposal
> http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/CanvasInWorkers and commenting on it?


Sure. Kyle and I looked at it while we were working on our proposal. The
main issues I have with it are that rearchitecting <canvas> to introduce
the DrawingBuffer layer of abstraction seems unnecessarily complex, and it
doesn't handle direct presentation of frames from the worker, bypassing the
main thread.

There's been some recent discussion in the WebGL WG on this topic and
> concerns were raised from other parties at Mozilla about the
> DrawingBuffer proposal above, including that it isn't possible to
> render from a worker without synchronizing with the main thread.
>

This is a huge limitation. For games and other animated content, achieving
a stable frame rate is super important and a key motivation for adding
canvas support to workers.

My vision for handling the Maps use-cases based on our proposal is this:
the worker renders to one or more WorkerCanvases, then does
createImageBitmap(canvasContext), then ships the ImageBitmap(s) to the main
thread using postMessage, and then renders those ImageBitmaps either by
drawing them to a canvas or in some more direct way.

This can all be implemented in a zero-copy way with the APIs currently in
the spec, though it's not trivial. You'd need to do a few optimizations:
-- createImageBitmap(canvasContext) would take a lazy snapshot of the
canvas contents; i.e., further modifications to the canvas would trigger a
copy (on the worker), but if the canvas is untouched no copy is required.
-- structured clone of the ImageBitmap would not copy. This may actually
require a small spec change.
-- drawing an ImageBitmap to a 2D <canvas>, if it covers the whole canvas,
would simply replace the canvas buffer with the ImageBitmap contents (and
perform copy-on-write if the script later makes changes to that canvas).
These optimizations would all be useful in other contexts too. Whatever
happens with canvas-in-a-worker, I bet we'll end up doing these
optimizations for other reasons.

It might make sense to create an API that renders an ImageBitmap more
directly than drawing it to a canvas. For example we could create an API
that allows an <img> element to render an ImageBitmap. It would be a bit
simpler for authors and perhaps a bit simpler to implement than the final
optimization in my list above.

Rob
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