Re: exposing CANVAS or something like it to Web Workers

I put up a new proposal for canvas in workers

http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/CanvasInWorkers

Please take a look.

This proposal comes from offline discussions with representatives from the
various browsers as well as input from the Google Maps team. I can post a
summary here if you'd like but it might be easier to read the wiki

Looking forward to feedback.




On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 10:50 AM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Jan 2013, Gregg Tavares (社ç~T¨) wrote:
> >
> > Another issue as come up and that is one of being able
> > to synchronize updates of a canvas in
> > worker with changes in the main page.
>
> For 2D, the intended solution is to just ship the ImageBitamp from the
> worker canvas to the main thread via a MessagePort and then render it on
> the canvas at the appropriate time.
>
> I don't know how you would do it for WebGL.
>
>
> > Similarly, let's say you have 2 canvases and are rendering to both in a
> > worker.  Does
> >
> >    context1.commit();
> >    context2.commit();
> >
> > guarantee you'll see both commits together?
>
> No, unfortunately not. There's no synchronisation between workers and the
> main thread (by design, to prevent any possibility of deadlocks), and
> there's not currently a batching API.
>
> However, if this becomes a common problem (which we can determine by
> seeing if we get bugs complaining about different parts of apps/games
> seeming to slide around or generally be slightly out of sync, or if we see
> a lot of authors shunting multiple ImageBitmap objects across MessagePort
> channels) we can always add an explicit batching API to make this kind of
> thing easy.
>
> Note that in theory, for 2D at least, shunting ImageBitmaps across threads
> can be as efficient as commit().
>
> --
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>