concur

A user-level threading library for JavaScript

try it out

node test.js

You can try running test.js a few times and see different results each time as it context switches on a timer!

how it works

Currently, each thread is just a generator function which yields at any point (between any two statements). we drop back into a thread manager which checks how much time elapsed, and if it's beyond the threshold of 1ms, we context switch. threads are scheduled in FIFO order. additionally, once a thread finishes (returns from the function rather than yield), we stop scheduling it (duh).

caveats

Technically this is non-preemptive scheduling, since if we had no yields the threads would run in full. But the plan is to write a compiler that will look for specific directives and spit out a file with yields following every statement/expression, allowing for random context switches at any time.

TODO

• implement join
• implement fork
• remove the need to call thread.manager()
• concur now stipulates that there be a main thread from which all other threads fork. it makes the code a bit nicer, and I may streamline the creation of the main thread in the future (so that it is more of a specialized thread than a normal one), which should take care of the call to thread.manager().
• implement finish
• better scheduling algo!
• write a compiler from js to concur-ready js

ideas?

• implement concur(context, func[, func[, ...func]]) to execute the argument functions concurrently. context is the shared context between the functions. each func takes a context as its sole argument.

why?

I'm currently taking an operating systems class at UC San Diego where we learned about user- and kernel-level threads. I wanted to try my hand at user-level threads in JavaScript, since it could probably be pretty useful.