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Mozilla Tackles Parallel Javascript
Mozilla, which has been conducting experiments with its SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, wants to bring parallelism to JavaScript.
Credit: Spidermonkey.com
Mozilla wants to bring parallelism to JavaScript in an attempt to fully leverage hardware capabilities.
The company has been conducting experiments with its SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, taking a low-level approach to extending Java with primitives for parallelism, according to Mozilla Research's Dave Herman. The focus is on "unlocking the power lurking inside our devices: [graphics processing units], [single instruction, multiple data] instructions, and multiple processor cores," he says.
The experiments involve a SharedArrayBuffer application programming interface (API) in SpiderMonkey. Herman notes Mozilla is drafting a specification featuring the API, with a prototype implementation featured in Firefox Nightly builds.
A SharedArrayBuffer type with built-ins for locking introduces new forms of blocking to workers, plus the possibility that some objects could be subject to data races. The parallelism efforts do not pertain to concurrency. Herman says one option for achieving parallelism is to leverage the Project Nashorn model and turn JavaScript into a multithreaded data model.
From InfoWorld
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