3 ms·

I wonder if it would be possible to write a JS engine in Rust that would essentially make multi-threading JS possible... Use Rust's concurrency safety to pass r

I wonder if it would be possible to write a JS engine in Rust that would essentially make multi-threading JS possible... Use Rust's concurrency safety to pass resources around threads running JS. Doing this without making any changes to JS. Of course Node would then also be obsolete...

yazaddaruvala 10y ago
I consider the lack of parallelism[0] in JavaScript as a feature of JavaScript. [0] Note: parallelism is not the same as concurrency.
- Manishearth 10y ago
  JS does have proper parallelism, workers can run on separate threads and could be run on separate processors. There aren't as many primitives for dealing with cross-worker communication, but some exist and it's usable.
  - yazaddaruvala 10y ago
    JavaScript does not have parallelism! Browsers implement web workers and a "system call" which lets users initialize them through JS. A different implementation/deployment environment like Node does not have web workers. Through native modules, Node can have parallelism, but this is not a part of the language and Node isn't subject to implement web workers to be considered "running JavaScript". However, regardless of this JavaScript continues to have concurrency without parallelism. It would have been more accurate for my last message to have said: "I consider the lack of parallelism in JavaScript a feature given that it continues to have concurrency by default". Similarly, I'd argue that C does not have parallelism (just system calls ...), but C doesn't even have concurrency. As such I do not consider the lack of parallelism a feature of C.
    - Manishearth 10y ago
      I guess. I was thinking from the POV of web browsers.
Rusky 10y ago
The challenges in parallelizing JS have very little to do with its implementation language and almost everything to do with JS itself. Rust can't help you there.

3 ms·

I wonder if it would be possible to write a JS engine in Rust that would essentially make multi-threading JS possible... Use Rust's concurrency safety to pass r

by Cshelton 10y ago

yazaddaruvala 10y ago
I consider the lack of parallelism[0] in JavaScript as a feature of JavaScript. [0] Note: parallelism is not the same as concurrency.
- Manishearth 10y ago
  JS does have proper parallelism, workers can run on separate threads and could be run on separate processors. There aren't as many primitives for dealing with cross-worker communication, but some exist and it's usable.
  - yazaddaruvala 10y ago
    JavaScript does not have parallelism! Browsers implement web workers and a "system call" which lets users initialize them through JS. A different implementation/deployment environment like Node does not have web workers. Through native modules, Node can have parallelism, but this is not a part of the language and Node isn't subject to implement web workers to be considered "running JavaScript". However, regardless of this JavaScript continues to have concurrency without parallelism. It would have been more accurate for my last message to have said: "I consider the lack of parallelism in JavaScript a feature given that it continues to have concurrency by default". Similarly, I'd argue that C does not have parallelism (just system calls ...), but C doesn't even have concurrency. As such I do not consider the lack of parallelism a feature of C.
    - Manishearth 10y ago
      I guess. I was thinking from the POV of web browsers.
Rusky 10y ago
The challenges in parallelizing JS have very little to do with its implementation language and almost everything to do with JS itself. Rust can't help you there.