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Introducing Nexus.js: A multi-threaded JavaScript run-time

Abdullah Ali on December 09, 2017

First of all, I recommend reading the old series if you're not familiar with this project. If you don't want to read all of that, no worries! I got...
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Anton Alexandrenok
let count = 0;

acceptor.on('connection', (socket, endpoint) => {
  const connId = count++;

How does it work? If event listeners run on parallel threads, there will be a race condition in the increment without synchronization.

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Abdullah Ali

Hi! Concurrent access to variables does not corrupt them or cause a race condition. All variables behave atomically in Nexus.

Read more here: nexusjs.com/architecture/

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Anton Alexandrenok • Edited

So, in this particular example

When two different execution contexts that share a closure variable are entered in parallel, one will acquire a lock

means that a listener will lock on parent closure right at the start of the function till its end? Or it will lock only from the time of identifier resolution for count to finishing its value reading?

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Abdullah Ali

It will only lock upon access to the variable and then it will release the lock as soon as it is done.

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Anton Alexandrenok

Thank you.

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Abdullah Ali

You’re welcome :)

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Brandon Ros

Post a graph comparing a similar node.js application (and maybe even Java/Haskell/whatever people compare these days) and show how this handles concurrent requests in a more performant fashion?

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Abdullah Ali

That’s all planned. :)

I’m just waiting till Nexus is a little more mature before making big comparisons.

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Joe Pea

A simple test comparing simple things like many setTimeout operations compared to Node.js would be nice, before the more complicated tests.

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jtenner

Is there a location for chat? Like discord, or slack where people can chat about it?

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Abdullah Ali

There is a Gitter channel here: gitter.im/voodooattack/nexusjs

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Sreejith • Edited

Few newbie questions.
Where can I use this? inside a node server? or can I use it on the clientside?
From the docs it says multi-threaded JavaScript run-time, so is it like V8?
Can we make use of WebAssembly and create a library to support multi-threading much more effectively?

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Abdullah Ali

Hi! You can only use Nexus on the server right now. It's a stand-alone environment and doesn't require a Node.js installation.

It's not based on V8, it's based on JSC.

I just introduced WebAssembly support to the repo. So yes, you can use multi-threading with WebAssembly now. Although I'm still ironing out the details.

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Michiel van der Blonk

Incredible!

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Abdullah Ali

Thank you. :)

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Vaibhav Bansal

This sounds amazing. Can you do an article comparing it with napajs ? That'll be great

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Abdullah Ali

I certainly plan to do that at some point, once I get the code to a more stable state. :)

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Joe Pea

This is a nice project! Any news on this?

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leecen

You can support commonJs like Node module Suorce Code

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Abdullah Ali

Even Node itself is phasing away from CommonJS, why would I want to repeat its mistakes?