An asynchronous runtime compatible with WebAssembly and non-WebAssembly targets.
When designing components and libraries that works on both WebAssembly targets backed by JavaScript Runtime and non-WebAssembly targets with Native Runtimes. Developers usually face challenges that requires applying multiple feature flags throughout their application:
- Select I/O and timers that works with the target runtime.
- Native Runtimes usually require
Sendfutures and WebAssembly types are usually!Send.
To alleviate these issues, Prokio implements a single-threaded runtime that executes ?Send
(Send or !Send) futures.
On platforms with multi-threading support, prokio spawns multiple independent runtimes proportional
to the CPU core number. When tasks are spawned with a runtime handle, it will randomly select a
worker thread from the internal pool. All tasks spawned with spawn_local will run on the same thread
as the thread the task was running. When the runtime runs in a WebAssembly target, all
tasks will be scheduled on the main thread.
This runtime is designed in favour of IO-bounded workload with similar runtime cost. When running I/O workloads, it would produce a slightly better performance as tasks are never moved to another thread. However, If a worker thread is busy, other threads will not be able to steal tasks scheduled on the busy thread. When you have a CPU-bounded task where CPU time is significantly more expensive, it should be spawned with a dedicated thread (or Web Worker) and communicates with the application using channels.
Prokio provides the following components:
- A Task Scheduler that is capable of running non-Send tasks.
- A Timer that is compatible with the scheduler backend.
- Task Synchronisation Mechanisms.
Prokio runtime is implemented with different runtimes depending on the target platform and can use all features (timers / IO / task synchronisation) from the selected native runtime:
wasm-bindgen-futures(WebAssembly targets)tokio(non-WebAssembly targets)