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

Using Atomics to coordinate the use of shared memory


In the previous recipe, we used multiple workers to produce portions of a result. We could merge these results in the main thread. While valid, this approach doesn't take full advantage of parallel processing. It would be preferable if the workers could accumulate the results themselves.

Mutating shared memory in multiple parallel threads exposes the possibility of race conditions. This is when several operations need to occur in a specific order that is not enforced. Luckily, we can use the Atomics API to coordinate these operations.

In this recipe, we'll see how to use the Atomics API to accumulate results while avoiding race conditions.

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.

How to do it...

  1. Open your command-line application and navigate to your workspace.
  2. Create a new folder named 05-08-use-atomics-to-coordinate...