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Indeed, nothing in Javascript _language_ indicates that is has to be single-threaded. Then the author continues by comparing this with C and talks about threads

• tyingq 9y ago
  C is low level enough that you can mutex around non thread safe stuff, without big changes to the underlying implementation. I suppose the JS language spec itself doesn't rule out multi-threaded, but I imagine that would be a fairly big endeavor to re-do the guts of any implementation. The current limitations of web workers seems to confirm that.
  • saurik 9y ago
    With a concurrency-safe garbage collector (which isn't even hard to come by) I would argue the exact same is true of JavaScript. It really isn't a language detail and I would argue it would be a weekend project to get real multithreading working for JavaScript (as in, to the point where it works as well as in C, which is to say it might require tons of mutex locks everywhere).
    • pcwalton 9y ago
      It's already been implemented, in fact, in the venerable Rhino JS engine.
    • aardvark179 9y ago
      It can be done, and has been in Rhino, Nashorn, and graal.js. The problem isn't in the language per se but in the libraries provided as standard (mutexes, thread safe hashes/property access etc.) and in the implementation. It's much easier to build a JIT when you don't have to worry about concurrent threads of execution, and converting a single threaded JIT to a robust multithreaded one can take a lot of work.