shared-ring-buffer

Overview

The shared-ring-buffer library is designed to streamline data transfer between multiple workers or threads in JavaScript applications. It leverages a ring buffer structure for continuous data reads and writes, offering a performance boost over the traditional postMessage() method. This approach simplifies development by abstracting complex behaviors like wrap-around, making it more accessible for developers to implement efficient data sharing across threads.

Prerequisite

To use shared-ring-buffer, your environment must have https enabled, and your web page must include the following headers for security and cross-origin policies:

'Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy': 'same-origin',
'Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy': 'require-corp',

Supported buffer views

The library supports a wide range of typed arrays for versatile data handling:

• Uint8Array
• Uint8ClampedArray
• Int8Array
• Uint16Array
• Int16Array
• Uint32Array
• Int32Array
• Float32Array
• Float64Array

Why shared-ring-buffer?

shared-ring-buffer is meant for developing high-performance JavaScript applications with responsive UIs. Offloading tasks to Web Workers can improve application responsiveness, but traditional communication via postMessage() can be slow and inconsistent. Modern browsers offer the SharedArrayBuffer API to facilitate shared memory access across threads. shared-ring-buffer simplifies this process by providing a straightforward interface for safe, race condition-free data reading and writing, thereby enhancing developer productivity and application performance.

API

declare function isSupportedSharedArrayBuffer(): boolean;

declare function createRingBuffer<T extends TypedArray>(
    elementCount: number,
    typedArrayConstructor?: TypedArrayConstructor,
    bufferConstructor?: { new (byteLength: number): ArrayBufferLike; }
): RingBuffer<T> | Error;

declare class RingBuffer<T extends TypedArray> {
    constructor(buffer: ArrayBufferLike, typedArrayConstructor: TypedArrayConstructor);
    getBuffer: () => ArrayBuffer;
    shift(size: number): T;
    shiftAndCopy(outputBuffer: T): T;
    push(data: T): true | Error;
    getCapacity(): number;
    getAvailableSize(): number;
    getOccupiedSize(): number;
}

Usage

To effectively utilize the shared-ring-buffer in your project, start by creating a ring buffer once with createRingBuffer. Then, extract its raw buffer using getBuffer() and transfer it to another thread. In the receiving thread, instantiate a new RingBuffer with this raw buffer.

Following example is taken from audio processing code where Float32Array represents audio samples.

// In the main thread
const worker = new Worker("worker.js");

const ringBuffer = createRingBuffer<Float32Array>(500_000, Float32Array);
worker.postMessage({
    sharedBuffer: ringBuffer.getBuffer(),
});
ringBuffer.push(new Float32Array(1_000)); // pushes 1000 empty audio samples to buffer

// In an audio worker
self.onmessage = (e: MessageEvent) => {
    const ringBuffer = new RingBuffer<Float32Array>(e.data.sharedBuffer, Float32Array);
    const data = ringBuffer.shift(1_000)); // reads 1000 audio samples from buffer
}

Installation

npm install shared-ring-buffer

Run examples

npm run dev

Test

npm run test

GIT

https://github.com/guntisdev/shared-ring-buffer

License

shared-ring-buffer is MIT licensed.