- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:13:49 -0700
- To: Justin James <j_james@mindspring.com>
- Cc: 'Ian Hickson' <ian@hixie.ch>, public-html@w3.org
On Jul 9, 2008, at 9:18 PM, Justin James wrote: > > I have some questions/comments/concerns on this: > > 1) The HTML 5 spec states that the DOM is not ECMAScript-only, but > acknowledges that no common browser is shipping with, say, Ruby or > Lisp as a > client-side scripting system. However, the current draft states that > it is > ECMAScript-only. How do we resolve this conflict? > > 2) No mention of inter-thread communications (such as semaphores) or > locking > mechanisms (spin locks, monitor, mutex, etc.). This is critical. Workers are designed to be shared-nothing message-passing threads (in the style of Erlang), not shared-memory threads a la C or Java, so there is no need for locking primitives and your concerns about deadlocks and the difficulty of multithreaded code do not apply. - Maciej > > > 3) I know it's a rough outline of the form that the spec will take, > but it > must have mechanisms for the UA to do things like force the breaking > of a > deadlock. Without this, it is trivial for a poorly written piece of > code to > absolutely cripple the browser quite by accident, and pass testing > 99.9999% > of the time. > > 4) Multithreaded code is *insanely* difficult for the average > programmer to > write, debug, and test. If we can't get the typical Web developer to > spit > out valid HTML, do we *really* want to enable them to inflict > multithreaded > code on their users? Of course, my hope is that few developers will > actually > use it, just as threads have been available to desktop app > developers for a > long time, but only a small fraction of developers actually use them. > > 5) Threading is something that should be specified at the language > level > nearly all of the time. How/why are we now trying to implement it as > part of > the HTML 5 spec? I would think that adding thread support to > ECMAScript is > the ECMAScript group's responsibility. > > 6) I have a sizable amount of experience on the development end of > writing > multithreaded applications. What do I need to do to actively > participate in > the development of this spec? It's a topic that I am particularly > interested > in. > > Thanks! > > J.Ja > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html- >> request@w3.org] On >> Behalf Of Ian Hickson >> Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 9:30 PM >> To: public-html@w3.org >> Subject: Workers >> >> >> >> Based on popular demand (and threats that without a spec >> implementations >> would proceed regardless) I have started collecting use cases and >> requirements for a specification for background worker scripts >> ("threads") >> in JavaScript: >> >> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-workers/current-work/#requirements >> >> Any feedback would be greately appreciated, especially from authors >> involved in large Web applications who would make significant use of >> such >> a feature, and from implementors of browsers that may support this. >> >> -- >> Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. >> fL >> http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ >> ,. >> Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`- >> .;.' > >
Received on Thursday, 10 July 2008 09:14:31 UTC