Re: New name for "AudioWorker"

On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 6:32 PM, Chris Wilson <cwilso@google.com> wrote:

> I'm actually off-the-cuff against trying to boil the ocean of the general
> pattern.  This is pretty specific - the new thing , runs *IN* something
> that can be a Worker-like process, but they're expected to share the
> process.  The thing you can instantiate lots of (runtime contexts?) run
> inside that process.
>

It might look like a worker-like process, but is actually pretty different:
it does not run continuously, for starters.


>
> I was expecting we would rename AW to CustomAudioProcessor, still define
> them as running inside a Worker (and define how that Worker-sharing works),
> and use Worker messaging.  That seemed like the shortest path to success.
>

Yes, but we've clearly shown that this cannot work, because workers bring
in a model and APIs that can't work for us.

We have the same model than what the CSS and video folk need (something
happens on some thread, we run a bit of script on this thread). We also
need light input from ECMA so we don't redefine too much things. I think
it's the right way to do it to avoid wasting other people's time and have
solid spec and implementations.

Paul.


>
> On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 9:16 AM, Hongchan Choi <hongchan@google.com> wrote:
>
>> Nothing forces workers to be heavy weight, but doesn't it have the
>> assumption that it runs on its own thread? What we want is to be able to
>> throw JS code into VM that runs on the audio thread.
>>
>> Perhaps we can break that assumption, and propose a new type of Worker.
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 9:09 AM Alex Russell <slightlyoff@google.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Why isn't this thing a worker? What forces workers to be heavyweight?
>>>
>>> Also, would be good to align with the Houdini folks on this as they're
>>> proposing similar things in the rendering and compositing space.
>>>
>>> Regards
>>> On 7 Oct 2015 7:52 a.m., "Paul Adenot" <padenot@mozilla.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> We need to decide for a new name for something that:
>>>>
>>>> - Runs off-main-thread
>>>> - Has access to a very limited set of APIs
>>>> - Can be instantiated a lot of times in the same document (much more
>>>> than Workers can or would)
>>>> - Is specialized to one domain (audio, video, etc.)
>>>> - ... ?
>>>>
>>>> It is likely that we would be the first group to spec something like
>>>> this, but it would be used by other groups (layout people, video/image
>>>> processing folks, etc.). We need something that is not too tied to audio,
>>>> or can be adapted. I propose "Processor", which conveys the meaning of
>>>> taking something as input, applying a transformation, and outputting it.
>>>> I'm very open to suggestions though, this is merely to get the ball rolling.
>>>>
>>>> Thoughts ?
>>>> Paul.
>>>>
>>>
>