Emscripten gains experimental pthreads support

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/emscripten-discuss/gQQRjajQ6iY

by vmorgulis • 11 years ago

87 21 11 years ago

groups.google.com

haberman• 11 years ago

Looks like this announcement is from two months ago. Anyone have experience using this?

gunyarakun• 11 years ago

I found some bugs and commented on the original pull request for the pthread support. https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/pull/3266.

In my opinion, the pthread support itself works well now. But the biggest problem of the implementation is that SharedArrayBuffer, the pthread support calls for, is implemented only in Firefox currently.

One of the purpose to use emscripten is made an application cross-platform web application. You can get a "non-webbish" code runs only in Firefox with pthread-supported emscripten as of now.

I'm looking forward to other browsers with SharedArrayBuffer support, especially Mobile Safari.

marcosscriven• 11 years ago

Looks like it's coming to Chrome: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...

But agree iOS Safari would be a great addition for this.

bobajeff3• 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure it's also behind a flag and will remain so until the spec is stable enough that it won't change when it becomes standard (likely EcmaScript 2017).

jbb555• 11 years ago

I hate all this web stuff so much. It's slowly reinventing the last 40 years of computing, only a slow, badly designed, unreliable base.

code_sterling• 11 years ago

You are welcome to come up with a better idea.

moonchrome4• 11 years ago

It's easy to come up with a better idea - getting that idea implemented on a significant % of working devices not so much.

gaigepr• 11 years ago

I'm a guy who thinks we should have pushed forward with Assembly, C, and Lisp as the stack for everything. You always have a good tool for the abstraction level you need.

Certhas• 11 years ago

I don't think reinventing is quite right, reimplementing more like it.

Remember the thing that Microsoft was afraid of for the Web? A middle layer that makes your OS mostly irrelevant.

It took a roundabout way but we're getting there. Extremely high performance virtual machines that are all fairly compatible, are deployed across a vast range of operating systems and devices today.

Together with an UI toolkit that renders fairly similarly across all these devices.

Technically this maybe can't do things that a single computer couldn't do ages ago, but now every computer can run that code. And via LLVM you can compile almost anything to js.

And with a much better security model than "download random exe and run" as well.

The sneering merely shows that you haven't really thought about what is going on here.

striking2• 11 years ago

The VMs aren't even close to "high performance" (although they are very wonderfully compatible), and the UI toolkit is not one (it's a document markup toolkit with buttons and such glued on, it's pretty awful compared to Mac OS's Interface Builder).

And any computer can run just about any kind of code now. Ask someone to download Python or LuaJIT and they can run your code.

Security models? In Lua, you can empty the environment and start fresh. You have a perfect sandbox with the flip of a switch.

I don't think the grandparent comment is sneering. I think he has an opinion that disagrees with yours.

bobajeff3• 11 years ago

It's not reinventing computing it's expanding its platform -- a popular, vendor neutral, abstraction over all kinds of hardware and operating systems that allows secure emphereal usage of software applications -- to allow complex and performant applications without compromising on it's core design principles.

Emscripten gains experimental pthreads support

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