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Concurrent programming coming to JavaScript



Hi All,

I find the following to be of extreme importance to us CSP lovers:

Brendan "JavaScript" Eich wants to include *useable* language-level support for concurrency into JavaScript 3

Key quotes:

A requirement for JS3 (along with hygienic macros) is to do something along these more implicit lines of concurrency support. In all the fast yet maintainable MT systems I've built or worked on, the key idea (which Will Clinger stated clearly to me over lunch last fall) is to separate the mutable unshared data from the immutable shared data. Do that well, with language and VM support, and threads become what they should be: not an abstraction violator from hell, but a scaling device that can be composed with existing abstractions.

So here's a promise about threads ... JS3 will be ready for the multicore desktop workload.

Link: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/02/ threads_suck.html

There is a growing belief that Ecmascript / JavaScript is about to become The Next Big Language. Static typing is being added, as well as other "in the large" features. Performance is becoming competitive with Java. I think it's already the most widely known language...

Some of you heavy-hitters really need to start up a dialogue with Eich.

Of course the future is always murky, but there's a pretty real possibility that this is *the* opportunity to take the CSP ideas we love mainstream. An opportunity such that has never existed and may never again.

At *least* it might be possible to steer things such that the primitives can support fine-grained, high performance CSP via a library.

Peter - remember your CSP workshops at Sun where you convinced (IIRC) everyone except Gosling? Time for a re-run at the Mozilla foundation! These open-source types are much cuddlier than corporate lackeys y'know :-)

Time to act!

Tom