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WebAssembly Worker Based Threads

Category

Performance

Type

New or changed feature

Status

Enabled by default (Chrome 74)

Intent stage

Shipped

Summary

The WebAssembly Threads feature allows multiple WebAssembly instances in separate Web Workers to share a single WebAssembly.Memory object. As with SharedArrayBuffers in JavaScript, this allows very fast communication between the Workers. This can be used to offload computation to another thread to keep the main thread and its UI responsive.

Standards & signals

• Specification: https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads/blob/master/proposals/threads/Overview.md
• Firefox: Shipped/Shipping
• Safari: Positive
• Web developers: Strongly positive
• Tracking bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=857476

Docs: https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads

Explainers: https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads/blob/master/proposals/threads/Overview.md

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