Book Image

Learn ECMAScript - Second Edition

By : MEHUL MOHAN, Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Learn ECMAScript - Second Edition

By: MEHUL MOHAN, Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Learn ECMAScript explores implementation of the latest ECMAScript features to add to your developer toolbox, helping you to progress to an advanced level. Learn to add 1 to a variable andsafely access shared memory data within multiple threads to avoid race conditions. You’ll start the book by building on your existing knowledge of JavaScript, covering performing arithmetic operations, using arrow functions and dealing with closures. Next, you will grasp the most commonly used ECMAScript skills such as reflection, proxies, and classes. Furthermore, you’ll learn modularizing the JS code base, implementing JS on the web and how the modern HTML5 + JS APIs provide power to developers on the web. Finally, you will learn the deeper parts of the language, which include making JavaScript multithreaded with dedicated and shared web workers, memory management, shared memory, and atomics. It doesn’t end here; this book is 100% compatible with ES.Next. By the end of this book, you'll have fully mastered all the features of ECMAScript!
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 12. Shared Memory and Atomics

Let's go to low-level memory stuff! This chapter is going to be a bit advanced, but interesting. I'll try to make it as simple and understandable as possible.

With that out of the way, let's get to what we've FINALLY in JavaScript! Low-level memory access, multi-threading, atomics, shared memory, and all that cool and powerful stuff. But, as someone said, with great power comes great responsibility. Let's go!

We'll cover the following things in this chapter:

  • Basics of memory management in computers
  • What is shared memory?
  • Using SharedArrayBuffer
  • Introduction to parallel programming
  • Problems when multiple threads access one memory location
  • What are atomics?
  • Performing atomic operations
  • Atomic APIs in JavaScript
  • Using parallel programming the right way