Re: Sync API for workers

"piranna@gmail.com" <piranna@gmail.com>, 2013-10-11 21:24 +0200:

> [Jonas said]:
> > * Enable compiling code that was written for other platforms to the
> > web. Specifically where such code uses synchronous APIs, but where we
> > for good reasons have chosen not to expose synchronous counterparts in
> > the web platform. The most obvious example here is synchronous
> > filesystem access which is very commonly used in other platforms like
> > posix and windows.
> >
> Synchronous APIs are easier to use since it's how things have been done
> since decades ago, but I don't think they fit in a event-oriented
> environment like Javascript, and more specially to some so time consuming
> like filesystem and IO. I find it better to only develop asynchronous APIs
> for this use cases. It would make sense to use synchronous APIs to help
> porting current code for example from C/C++ to Javascript, but the required
> POSIX-like APIs would be better developed as external libraries on top of
> the asynchronous ones.

When I see discussion of any new/recent synchronous APIs for the Web
platform these days I pretty much take it they're implicitly intended just
for use with Workers. So I assume that's the context Jonas intended.

  --Mike

P.S. Of course there's room for disagreement about whether synchronous APIs
are even a good idea even for the Workers case -

  http://infrequently.org/2013/05/the-case-against-synchronous-worker-apis-2/

-- 
Michael[tm] Smith http://people.w3.org/mike

Received on Saturday, 12 October 2013 02:43:39 UTC