Web Workers- web content to run scripts in background threads
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Web Workers is a JavaScript API that allows you to run scripts in a separate thread from the main one.
Use cases
Let’s say there’s a script that fetches and processes a file. If a file is considerably large it’ll take a long time to be processed! Which might stall other scripts that were invoked later from getting executed.
However, if the file processing is moved to a background thread, known as the worker thread, other events won’t be blocked until the former one is over.
The script executed in a background worker thread is known as the worker script or just the worker.
Service Workers
- Service workers, on the other hand, are a type of web workers.
- They are useful for modifying responses from network requests.
- They basically act as
proxies. - They are used for building offline apps.
Comlink
It offloads CPU-intensive tasks to worker threads in node.js. It's important to keep the main thread as idle as possible so it can respond to user interactions quickly and provide a jank-free experience. The UI thread ought to be for UI work only. WebWorkers are a web API that allows you to run code on a separate thread. To communicate with another thread, WebWorker offers the postMessage API. You can send JavaScript objects as message using myWorker.postMessage(someObject), triggering a message event inside the worker.
Comlink turns this message-based API into something more developer-friendly by providing an RPC implementation; Values from one thread can be used within the other thread (and vice versa) just like local values.
workerize-loader :Automatically move a module into a Web Worker
A webpack loader that moves a module and its dependencies into a Web Worker, automatically reflecting exported functions as asynchronous proxies.
