Unlocking Multithreading for Smoother Web Applications

Coaction - An efficient and flexible state management library for building high-performance, multithreading web applications.

Repo: https://github.com/unadlib/coaction

Motivation

Modern web applications are becoming increasingly complex, pushing the boundaries of what's possible in the browser. Single-threaded JavaScript, while powerful, often struggles to keep up with the demands of sophisticated UIs, real-time interactions, and data-intensive computations. This bottleneck leads to performance issues, laggy or unresponsive interfaces, limitations in request connections, and ultimately, a compromised user experience.

While Web Workers (or SharedWorker) offer a path towards parallelism and improved performance, they introduce a new set of challenges. Managing state across threads, synchronizing data efficiently, and maintaining coherent application logic can quickly become a daunting task. Existing state management solutions often fall short in addressing these specific needs, either by being too tightly coupled to the worker thread or by introducing complex abstractions that hinder developer productivity.

Coaction was created out of the need for a state management solution that truly embraces the multithreading nature of modern web applications. It recognizes that performance and developer experience shouldn't be mutually exclusive. By leveraging the power of Web Workers and Shared Workers, Coaction allows developers to offload computationally intensive tasks and state management logic from the worker thread, resulting in a more responsive and fluid user interface.

More than just performance, Coaction is about enabling a more scalable and maintainable architecture for complex applications. The library's intuitive API, inspired by Zustand, ensures a smooth learning curve and a productive development workflow. Its support for Slices, namespaces, and computed properties promotes modularity and code organization, making it easier to manage large and evolving codebases.

Coaction's integration with data-transport unlocks a new level of flexibility in state synchronization. By supporting generic transport protocols, it opens up possibilities for various communication patterns and architectures, catering to the unique needs of different applications.

In essence, Coaction empowers developers to build the next generation of web applications without sacrificing performance, developer experience, or architectural integrity. It bridges the gap between the increasing complexity of web applications and the need for efficient, maintainable, and performant state management across threads. It's a tool designed for developers who strive to create exceptional user experiences in a world where parallelism and responsiveness are no longer optional, but essential. It also supports remote synchronization, making it suitable for building any CRDTs application as well.

Concepts and Features

Coaction aims to provide a secure and efficient solution for sharing and synchronizing state in multithreading environments (such as Web Workers, Shared Workers, or even across processes and devices) in web applications.

Key features include:

• Multithreading Sync: Supports sharing state between webpage thread and the worker thread. With data-transport for generic communication, developers can avoid the complexities of message passing and serialization logic.
• Immutable State with Optional Mutability: Powered by the Mutative library, the core provides an immutable state transition process while allowing performance optimization with mutable instances when needed.
• Patch-Based Updates: Enables efficient incremental state changes through patch-based synchronization, simplifying its use in CRDTs applications.
• Built-in Computed: Supports derived properties based on state dependencies, making it easier to manage and retrieve computed data from core states.
• Slices Pattern: Easily combine multiple slices into a store with namespace.
• Extensible Middleware: Allows for middleware to enhance the store's behavior, such as logging, time-travel debugging, or integration with third-party tools.
• Integration with 3rd-Party Libraries: Supports popular frameworks like React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, and Solid, as well as state management libraries such as Redux, Zustand, and MobX.

Operating Modes and Fundamentals

This library operates in two primary modes:

• Standard Mode
  • In a standard webpage environment, the store is managed entirely within the webpage thread. Patch updates are disabled by default to ensure optimal performance in standard mode.
• Shared Mode
  • The worker thread serves as the primary source of the shared state, utilizing transport for synchronization.
  • Webpage thread act as clients, accessing and manipulating the state asynchronously through a store.

In shared mode, the library automatically determines the execution context based on the transport parameters, handling the synchronization thread seamlessly.

You can easily use Coaction in your application to support multiple tabs, multithreading, or multiprocessing.

For example, for a 3D scene shared across several tabs, you can effortlessly handle their state management using Coaction.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/9eb9f4f8-8d47-433a-8eb2-85f044d6d8fa

Shared Mode - Sequence Diagram

Performance

Measure(ops/sec) to update 10K arrays, bigger is better(view source).

This table benchmarks various state management libraries on large initialization tasks. Coaction stands out dramatically, performing at least hundreds of times faster in certain scenarios. For example, in the “bigInitWithoutRefsWithoutAssign” test, Coaction achieves 18,809 ops/sec compared to MobX’s 37.67 ops/sec—over 500 times faster. Similarly, in the “init” test, Coaction reaches 8,523 ops/sec versus MobX’s 43.88 ops/sec—an increase of roughly 200 times. Additionally, Coaction consistently outperforms other libraries across various initialization scenarios, showcasing its exceptional efficiency in handling large-scale data initialization. These results highlight Coaction’s superior performance and make it a highly effective solution for managing complex state in modern front-end applications.

We will also provide more complete benchmarking.

Installation

You can install @coaction/react for React application via npm, yarn, or pnpm.

npm install coaction @coaction/react

If you want to use the core library without any framework, you can install coaction via npm, yarn, or pnpm.

npm install coaction

Usage

Standard Mode Store

import { create } from '@coaction/react';

const useStore = create((set, get) => ({
  count: 0,
  increment: () => set((state) => state.count++)
}));

const CounterComponent = () => {
  const store = useStore();
  return (
    <div>
      <p>Count: {store.count}</p>
      <button onClick={store.increment}>Increment</button>
    </div>
  );
};

Shared Mode Store

counter.js:

import { create } from '@coaction/react';

export const counter = (set) => ({
  count: 0,
  increment: () => set((state) => state.count++)
});

worker.js:

import { create } from '@coaction/react';
import { counter } from './counter';

const useStore = create(counter);

import { create } from '@coaction/react';

const worker = new Worker(new URL('./worker.js', import.meta.url));
const useStore = create(counter, { worker });

const CounterComponent = () => {
  const store = useStore();
  return (
    <div>
      <p>Count in Worker: {store.count}</p>
      <button onClick={store.increment}>Increment</button>
    </div>
  );
};

Slices Pattern And Derived Data

import { create } from '@coaction/react';

const counter = (set) => ({
  count: 0,
  // derived data without cache
  get tripleCount() {
    return this.count * 3;
  },
  // derived data with cache
  doubleCount: get(
    (state) => [state.counter.count],
    (count) => count * 2
  ),
  increment() {
    set(() => {
      // you can use `this` to access the slice state
      this.count += 1;
    });
  }
});

const useStore = create({
  counter
});

Conclusion

In essence, Coaction empowers developers to build the next generation of web applications without sacrificing performance, developer experience, or architectural integrity. It bridges the gap between the increasing complexity of web applications and the need for efficient, maintainable, and performant state management across threads. It's a tool designed for developers who strive to create exceptional user experiences in a world where parallelism and responsiveness are no longer optional, but essential. It also supports remote synchronization, making it suitable for building any CRDTs application as well.

Repo: https://github.com/unadlib/coaction