Parallel Programming for the Web

Parallel hardware is today’s reality and language extensions that ease exploiting its promised performance flourish. For most mainstream languages, one or more tailored solutions exist that address the specific needs of the language to access parallel hardware. Yet, one widely used language is still stuck in the sequential past: JavaScript, the lingua franca of the web.

Our position is that existing solutions do not transfer well to the world of JavaScript due to differences in programming models, the additional requirements of the web, like safety, and to developer expectations. To address this we propose River Trail, a new parallel programming API designed specifically for JavaScript and we show how it satisfies the needs of the web. To prove that our approach is viable, we have implemented a prototype JIT compiler in Firefox that shows an order of magnitude performance improvement for a realistic web application.