WebAssembly Worker Based Threads

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.

Comments

Shipping criteria on Android still unresolved. Also, more discussions of the related feature SharedArrayBuffers are discussed in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dnUjxfGWnvhQEIyCZb0F2LmCZ9gio6ogu2rhMGqi6gY/edit

Documentation

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

Specification

Working draft or equivalent

Status in Chromium

Blink components: Blink>JavaScript>WebAssembly

Enabled by default (tracking bug) in:

• Chrome for desktop release 74

Consensus & Standardization

• Firefox: In development
• Edge: In development
• Safari: Public support
• Web Developers: Strongly positive

Owners

• binji@chromium.org
• gdeepti@chromium.org
• titzer@chromium.org
• hablich@chromium.org
• nattestad@chromium.org

Last updated on 2019-04-08