plexus-csp

Contents

• About
• Installation
• Documentation
• Tutorial
  • Go Blocks
  • Deferreds
  • Running Things in Parallel
  • Deferreds vs Promises
  • Composing Go Blocks
  • Error Handling Basics
  • More on Error Handling
  • NodeJS helpers
  • Channels
  • Buffered Channels
  • Working with Multiple Channels
  • Select
• License

About

The goal of plexus-csp is to provide concurrency support inspired by Go channels and goroutines, and by the core.async library in Clojure. Both are strongly influenced by Tony Hoare's theory of communicating sequential processes (CSP), and somewhat related to the classical Unix concept of pipes. The common feature of all these approaches is the idea of providing a single communication mechanism, usually called a channel, between concurrent threads of execution (processes, threads, goroutines etc) with semantics that make it both practical and comparatively easy to reason about.

The first part of this tutorial describes the asynchronous core of plexus-csp, the aim of which is to build a solid foundation for the channel functionality while providing features that are also useful on their own. It is in some ways similar to libraries such as co which integrate asynchronous, non-blocking calls into a more traditional control flow through the use of ES6 generators, but puts a higher emphasis on composability and seamless concurrency. The second part is about channels.

Installation

Install as a Node package:

npm install plexus-csp

For easier integration, precompiled code (via regenerator) is included that runs on ES5 engines without generator support. To use this version, require it as follows:

var csp = require('plexus-csp');

Client code that uses go blocks still needs to run on an engine that supports generators or be precompiled into ES5-compliant code, for example with browserify and the regeneratorify plugin.