Book Image

ECMAScript Cookbook

By : Ross Harrison
Book Image

ECMAScript Cookbook

By: Ross Harrison

Overview of this book

ECMAScript Cookbook follows a modular approach with independent recipes covering different feature sets and specifications of ECMAScript to help you become an efficient programmer. This book starts off with organizing your JavaScript applications as well as delivering those applications to modem and legacy systems. You will get acquainted with features of ECMAScript 8 such as async, SharedArrayBuffers, and Atomic operations that enhance asynchronous and parallel operations. In addition to this, this book will introduce you to SharedArrayBuffers, which allow web workers to share data directly, and Atomic operations, which help coordinate behavior across the threads. You will also work with OOP and Collections, followed by new functions and methods on the built-in Object and Array types that make common operations more manageable and less error-prone. You will then see how to easily build more sophisticated and expressive program structures with classes and inheritance. In the end, we will cover Sets, Maps, and Symbols, which are the new types introduced in ECMAScript 6 to add new behaviors and allow you to create simple and powerful modules. By the end of the book, you will be able to produce more efficient, expressive, and simpler programs using the new features of ECMAScript. ?
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Sending SharedArrayBuffer to a Web Worker


Now that we know how to create and use a SharedArrayBuffer, we can use one to share data between the main thread and workers. As mentioned previously, this has an advantage over posting JavaScript objects, in that the data doesn't need to be copied; it is shared.

In this recipe, we'll see how to share a SharedArrayBuffer with a worker, and post the result back to the main thread.

Getting ready

This recipe assumes you already have a workspace that allows you to create and run ES modules in your browser. If you don't, please see the first two chapters. It also assumes that you have enabled shared memory in your browser. If you haven't please see the recipes at the beginning of this chapter.

How to do it...

  1. Open your command-line application, and navigate to your workspace.
  2. Create a new folder named 05-06-sending-shared-array-to-worker.
  3. Copy or create an index.htmlthat loads and runs amainfunction frommain.js.
  4. Create a main.jsfile with an onMessage function...