Pixel sorter shared memory
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Over the last year or so, Mozilla’s JS team has been leading a standards initiative to add building blocks for multicore computation to JS. Building Blocks: Shared Memory, Atomics, and Web Workers
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Hence JS has a problem: if we want JS applications on the web to continue to be viable alternatives to native applications on each platform, we have to give JS the ability to run well on multiple CPUs. That is not a problem for “native” applications, which are all written in multi-threaded programming languages (Java, Swift, C#, and C++), but it is a problem for JS, which has very limited facilities for running on multiple CPUs (web workers, slow message passing, and few ways to avoid data copying). A programmer who wants better performance for her program has to start using multiple cores in parallel. Instead of faster CPUs, all consumer devices - from desktop systems to smartphones - now have multiple CPUs (really CPU cores), and except at the low end they usually have more than two. The routine use of JS for these and many other tasks has been made possible by the spectacular performance improvements resulting from the use of Just-in-Time (JIT) compilers in JS engines, and by ever faster CPUs.īut JS JITs are now improving more slowly, and CPU performance improvement has mostly stalled. In fact, some of these applications are in the form of asm.js, a simple JS subset, that is a popular target language for C++ compilers game engines originally written in C++ are being recompiled to JS to run on the web as asm.js programs.
#PIXEL SORTER SHARED MEMORY PDF#
JS is also being used for more demanding tasks: Client-side image processing (in Facebook and Lightroom) is written in JS in-browser office packages such as Google Docs are written in JS and components of Firefox, such as the built-in PDF viewer, pdf.js, and the language classifier, are written in JS.
#PIXEL SORTER SHARED MEMORY CODE#
JavaScript (JS) has grown up, and it works so well that virtually every modern web page contains large amounts of JS code that we don’t ever worry about - it just runs as a matter of course. TL DR – We’re extending JavaScript with a primitive API that lets programmers use multiple workers and shared memory to implement true parallel algorithms in JavaScript. You can visit MDN’s SharedArrayBuffer documentation for more detail. Thus, if sab is a SharedArrayBuffer object and w is a worker, w.postMessage(sab) sends the buffer to the worker. When sending a SharedArrayBuffer with postMessage, the buffer should no longer be in the transfer list argument of the postMessage call. Author’s note: Since this post was written, the API of postMessage has changed slightly.