👷 Web Workers

If you have computation-heavy tasks in your app, you can offload them to a Web Worker (opens in a new tab). Workers are separate threads that runs in the background without blocking the UI, reducing jank in your canvas. You can for instance use Web Workers for pathfinding (opens in a new tab) or physics.

Web Workers rely on the postMessage and onmessage API to communicate with the main thread, which means you cannot wait for a particular message to be received and write code in a convenient async/await fashion. That's why some libraries have been created to help with the process:

• Comlink10k270k/w1y year
• workerpool2k5M/w – Supports pools, Node.js
  Supports pools, Node.js
• threads.js3k92k/w2y years – Supports pools, observables, Webpack, Node.js
  Supports pools, observables, Webpack, Node.js
• troika-worker-utils120k/w
• workerize-loader2k15k/w – Webpack loader
• Workerize4k700/w4y years
• comlink-loader6005k/w4y years – Webpack loader
• Greenlet5k600/w4y years

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import.meta.url

Note that you can use import.meta.url (opens in a new tab) to reference a Web Worker file from your filesystem:

const worker = new Worker(new URL('./worker.ts', import.meta.url))