On Fri, 12 Apr 2013, Filip Pizlo wrote: > > There is a possibility of deadlock. You can have one task waiting for a > message from another, and that other waiting for a message from the > first.
Actually, you can't. We very specifically designed workers (and even more importantly the API on the main thread) so that you cannot block on waiting for a message. Certainly you can have a logic error that causes the application to stop progressing, but you cannot have a deadlock that blocks the event loop of the main thread. Web APIs have different constraints than non-Web platforms that may help explain why the Web sometimes seems dumb from the perspective of professional programers or computer scientists. Specifically, the Web platform's design assumes the following: 1. Every Web author is potentially hostile and very clever, 2. Every Web author is potentially a bumbling fool. Most platforms instead assume that their programmers are mostly benign and that their programmers are mostly competent. These two assumptions are the main reason for almost every "weird" decision the Web platform has. If you want to do highly efficient computation, the Web is probably not going to be the best platform to use to do it, because computational performance has never been near the top of the priority list. Responsive UI is a high priority, security (resilience to hostile author code) is a high priority, fault tolerance has been a high priority (gracefully handling author mistakes), the ability to have code work uniformly across a wide variety of devices and platforms has been a high priority (most of the time, though we stumbled a bit with mobile input models). If you want to do intensive computation, the answer has traditionally been "do it on the server". -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev
