Threads in web apps

Browser multithreading based on Web Worker API

A tiny library for multithreading in browser. The library aims to make the work with worker in browsers easy.

Good for

• keep application state in a shared worker and have one source of thruth
• keep api calls, espcially via websocket in shared worker
• keep data normalization in another thread
• separate the ui thread from any heavy computation logic
• build a multiwindow in borwser progressive web applications with single state
• keep saving to local database and syncing everything later to a cloud away from main thread

Usage examples

Execute tasks

const task = { module: "console", method: "log", data: { message: "Hello World!" }}
const result = await thread.run(task);

Forward events

const event = { name: "message", data: { message: "Hello World!" }}
thread.forward(event);

Subscribe to all events

thread.on('name', listener);

Subscribe to state/api events

It takes the module and method names from the name of the event (aka path), executes the method, awaits and returns the result (trigers the listener)

thread.sub('/name', listener);

Future ventures

Eventually this should look something like goroutines. Where you call a method on a module/object/instance as it was in the main thread namesapse.

const result = await module.compute(somedata)

Where somedata could be a huge object.

But as an idea that still needs some research and performance mesures and as an alternative to using SharedArrayBuffer.

The shared worker would get some kind of id or query to be able to get the data directly from the local data base (eg IndexedDB) to avoid structural cloning between threads.