On: The Path to Parallel JavaScript

[coderzach]

Anecdotally, I've found that most performance hick-ups don't come from computation blocking the ui, but from rendering one part of the ui blocking every other part from rendering.

The solution to that being parallel or async paint/layout, which is something I never hear mentioned (probably because it's a really hard problem).

[Joe8Bit → coderzach]

Servo is actually in the process of implementing a parallel layout engine[1][2]

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(layout_engine) 2: http://pcwalton.github.io/blog/2014/02/25/revamped-parallel-...

[kibwen → Joe8Bit]

They've recently landed a tool that makes it possible to visualize the parallel rendering: https://github.com/servo/servo/pull/4969

[amelius → Joe8Bit]

Interesting. I wonder how they handle incremental rendering though. Only the forward-path is described in your reference [2].

[sanxiyn → amelius]

As far as I can tell there is nothing unusual or difficult here. Servo's incremental layout implementation is here: https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/master/components/layout...

[idbentley → coderzach]

I believe that the Servo project (https://github.com/servo/servo) is attempting to address exactly this.