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Comment by nostrebored | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for the excellent explanation!

I think of js entirely from a node.js perspective where I conceptualize it as an async task. Is this also wrong?

Node suffers from the same issues, but it's generally not as noticable in most cases. A similar situation in node would cause the server to not be able to respond to any other requests during the `JSON.parse` execution. But in the Node world, you have more options for how to get around those problems (like load balancing requests among several node processes).

But both server-side and client-side JS use the same system, the event loop. It's basically a message-queue of events that get stacked up, and the JS engine will one at a time grab the oldest event in that queue and process it to completion. Anything "async" will just throw a new event into that queue of events to be processed. The secret sauce is that any IO is done "outside" the JS execution, so other events can be processed while the IO is waiting to complete.

Take a look at this link, or search up the JS event-loop if you want to get a better explanation. It's deceptively simple.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Even...

> Is this also wrong?

Yes, node.js javascript runtime is based on V8, the same that runs in Chrome. Javascript is single threaded so anything that is not I/O bound will block the main thread. If you don't want to block the thread becasue you have long running calculation/parsing task, then you can use worker threads[1]. This will run your task in separate thread and not block the main one.

[1] https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v12.x/docs/api/worker_threads...

and not to beat a dead horse, but worker threads again wouldn't work in this exact situation even in Nodejs. They suffer from the same problems that web-workers do, meaning they use a structured copy algorithm to send data between workers (with the exception of TypedArrays), and therefore would hang the "main thread" just as long as if you did the `JSON.parse` directly in it.

It's a really annoying problem, and I'm actually really happy to see that many others have the exact same thoughts I had at the time, and that I wasn't just missing something obvious!

Fun detail: node internally will use thread pools to do CPU-intensive tasks that would normally block the main thread.

For example: https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/src/node_crypto.c...

I generally use that as an example when explaining to people why Node isn't a great fit for a lot of workloads. They have to use these features internally, but you as the user with a CPU-intensive job don't have access to those features.

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