I do understand, was just mobile and in a hurry so I failed to fully qualify the statement.
What I was saying is if you're in the WASM toolchain/ecosystem, something like pthreads would already be implemented by Emscripten[0]. In other words, spinning up web workers is handled for you seamlessly. It's all dealt with at a very low level of abstraction. You're literally using the SharedArrayBuffer as memory.
Contrast that to JS, and you have to serialize/deserialize types before they can even be stored in SharedArrayBuffer. It's costly and far from seamless.
As an aside, it's unfortunate SharedArrayBuffer was hit so hard by Spectre. The poor standard is cursed or something.
As you already hinted, SABs have been widely disabled. Chrome is currently the only browser who has SABs and therefore the only browser with support WebAssembly threads.
Workers, on the other hand, are available everywhere. And serialization seems to be far less costly than most people think. In the apps that I have written that make use of a off-main-thread architecture, structured clone has not been my bottle-neck.
>And serialization seems to be far less costly than most people think. In the apps that I have written that make use of a off-main-thread architecture, structured clone has not been my bottle-neck.
If you're working within a render loop it does hurt, but I agree it isn't an issue for a typical use case. I think what detracts more is the ergonomics of the serialize/deserialize operations. Those are just largely seamless on the emscripten side. On the other hand, a full wasm/emscripten toolchain in your project arguably comes with its own ergonomic cost.
What I was saying is if you're in the WASM toolchain/ecosystem, something like pthreads would already be implemented by Emscripten[0]. In other words, spinning up web workers is handled for you seamlessly. It's all dealt with at a very low level of abstraction. You're literally using the SharedArrayBuffer as memory.
Contrast that to JS, and you have to serialize/deserialize types before they can even be stored in SharedArrayBuffer. It's costly and far from seamless.
As an aside, it's unfortunate SharedArrayBuffer was hit so hard by Spectre. The poor standard is cursed or something.
[0] https://emscripten.org/docs/porting/pthreads.html