Re: Sync API for workers

On 09/06/2012 09:30 AM, Olli Pettay wrote:
> On 09/06/2012 09:12 AM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 11:02 PM, bugs@pettay.fi <bugs@pettay.fi> wrote:
>>> On 09/06/2012 08:31 AM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 8:07 PM, Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 2:49 AM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The problem with a "Only allow blocking on children, except that
>>>>>> window can't block on its children" is that you can never block on a
>>>>>> computation which is implemented in the main thread. I think that cuts
>>>>>> out some major use cases since todays browsers have many APIs which
>>>>>> are only implemented in the main thread.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> You can't have both--you have to choose one of 1: allow blocking upwards,
>>>>> 2:
>>>>> allow blocking downwards, or 3: allow deadlocks.  (I believe #1 is more
>>>>> useful than #2, but each proposal can go both ways.  I'm ignoring more
>>>>> complex deadlock detection algorithms that can allow both #1 and #2, of
>>>>> course, since that's a lot harder.)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Indeed. But I believe #2 is more useful than #1. I wasn't proposing
>>>> having both, I was proposing only doing #2.
>>>>
>>>> It's actually technically possible to allow both #1 and #2 without
>>>> deadlock detection algorithms, but to keep things sane I'll leave that
>>>> as out of scope for this thread.
>>>>
>>>> [snip]
>>>>>
>>>>> I think that's by far the most
>>>>> interesting category of use cases raised for this feature so far, the
>>>>> ability to implement sync APIs from async APIs (or several async APIs).
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> That is certainly an interesting use case. I think another interesting
>>>> use case is being able to write synchronous APIs in workers whose
>>>> implementation uses APIs that are only available on the main thread.
>>>>
>>>> That's why I'm not interested in only blocking on children, but rather
>>>> only blocking on parents.
>>>>
>>>>>> The fact that all the examples that people have used while we have
>>>>>> been discussing synchronous messaging have spun event loops in
>>>>>> attempts to deal with messages that couldn't be handled by the
>>>>>> synchronous poller makes me very much think that so will web
>>>>>> developers.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> getMessage doesn't spin the event loop.  "Spinning the event loop" means
>>>>> that tasks are run from task queues (such as asynchronous callbacks)
>>>>> which
>>>>> might not be expecting to run, and that tasks might be run recursively;
>>>>> none
>>>>> of that that happens here.  All this does is block until a message is
>>>>> available on a specified port (or ports), and then returns it--it's just
>>>>> a
>>>>> blocking call, like sync XHR or FileReaderSync.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The example from Olli's proposal 3 does what effectively amounts to
>>>> "spinning an event loop". It pulls out a bunch of events from the
>>>> normal event loop and then manually dispatches them in a while loop.
>>>> The behavior is exactly the same as spinning the event loop (except
>>>> that non-message tasks doesn't get dispatchet).
>>>
>>> It is just dispatching events.
>>> The problems we (Gecko) have had with event loop spinning in main thread
>>> relate mainly to the problems where "unexpected" events are dispatched while
>>> running the loop, as an example user input events or events coming from
>>> network.
>>> getMessage/waitForMessage does not have that problem.
>>
>> I'm not sure what you mean by "just dispatching events". That's
>> exactly what event loop spinning is.
>
> No. waitForMessage example I wrote down just dispatches DOM events in a loop.
> That is a synchronous operation and you know exactly which events you're
> about to dispatch.
> If you run the generic event loop, you also end up running
> timers and getting input from network and user etc. and you can't
> controls those.
>
>>
>> Why are the gecko events any more "unexpected" than the message events
>> that the example dispatches.
> We don't want to block certain events in Gecko (like user input to chrome).
> Blocking events in worker code is ok.
>
>> The network events or user input events
>> that we had are all events created by gecko code. The messages that
>> might get dispatches by the worker code can easily also be network
>> events or user events which are sent to the worker for processing.
>>
>> Web pages can have just as much inconsistent state while deep in call
>> stacks as we do.
> That is true...
>
>> If they at that point call into a library which
>> starts pulling messages off of the task queue and dispatches them,
>> they'll run into the same problems as we've had.
>
> ...but then it is up to the library to handle the case properly and
> dispatch events async.
>

Though, dispatching events async so that other new message events don't get handled before them
would require some new API.

>
> .Olli
>
>
>>
>> / Jonas
>>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 6 September 2012 06:38:05 UTC