Function#fork

[Jussi Kalliokoski]

Hello everyone,

I've been thinking a lot about parallel processing in the context of
JavaScript, and this is really a hard problem. I'm very curious to hear
what everyone's opinions are about it's problems and so forth, but I don't
think an open question like that will give very interesting results, so I
have an example problem for discussion (while it seems like a bad idea to
me, and unlikely to ever get to the language, what I want to know is
everyone's reasoning behind their opinions whether it's for or against).

What if we introduce Function#fork(), which would call the function in
another thread that shares state with the current one (how much state it
shares is an open question I'd like to hear ideas about, but one
possibility is that only the function arguments are shared) using a similar
signature to Function#call except that the first argument would be a
callback, which would have error as its first argument (if the forked
function throws with the given arguments, it can be controlled) and the
return value of the forked function as the second argument.

 * What are the technical limitations of this?
 * What are the bad/good implications of this on the language users?
 * Better ideas?
 * etc.

I have a detailed example of showing Function#fork in action [1] (I was
supposed to make a simplified test, but got a bit carried away and made it
do "parallel" fragment shading), it uses a simple fill-in for the
Function#fork using setTimeout instead of an actual thread.

Cheers,
Jussi

[1] https://gist.github.com/3775697
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/attachments/20120924/15426753/attachment.html>