Web workers on steroids really.

v-thread is a library that gives you bunch of amazing features and neat goodies when working with web workers.

Goodies include but not limited to:

• Abstracting away postMessage and onmessage so you can focus on your code,
• Being able to kill workers gracefully, giving them time to do clean up and stuff,
• Ability to pass additional data when workers are created,
• Enhancing errors, i.e if an error is thrown in Worker, final stack trace will also include calls in main thread that led to that error, so you know what's really going on

And the best of all, [brace yourself], being able to call methods defined in worker directly, just like you're used to.

Example

Let's say you're making WebGL app or similar. You might wanna do heavy computation inside a worker to avoid blocking the main (UI) thread.

v-thread can really ease the process.

Install

$ npm i v-thread

Light it up

// main.js

import { VThread } from 'v-thread'

(async () => {
    // start thread
    const thread = VThread.start('worker.js');

    // get proxy
    const worker = thread.getWorkerProxy();

    // have fun
    const bitmap = await worker.computeNextScene();
    
})();

// ...

// worker.js

import { VThreadable } from 'v-thread';

class Shader {

    // ...

    async computeNextScene() {
        const frame = await this.getNextFrame();
        const camera = this.getCameraOrientaion(frame);
        const scene = this.bakeScene(frame, camera);
        return scene.rgbBitmap;
    }
}

VThreadable.onStart(() => new Shader());

// ...

That's it!

Power of multi-threading, without the pain.

|Browser support|| |--------|------| | Chrome | 49 | | Firefox | 18 | | Edge | ✅ | | Opera | 36 | | Safari | 10 | | IE | ⛔ |

Edge on desktops requires version 12 or above

Head over to documentation for more info on whats available.

Related

co-web-worker - Cross-origin web workers. Works with v-thread

text-store - Super performant text container for working with massive text files