Worker Link

Opinionated library to work with threads in Node.js.

Attention: This library is in heavy development, you should not use it in production.

Prologue

I really like the Elixir way to deal with processes and concurrent communication. But I really love Node and all JS community. And I love so much types and resilient programming. This is the reason to creating this library.

The worker-link library is a set of classes and functions to write JavaScript classes that can run in parallel. Yes, parallel. This library is built on top of Node.js worker_threads module.

Getting Started

npm install worker-link

Example with TypeScript

// fib-worker.ts
import {worker, WorkerJob} from 'worker-link';
 
@worker({filename: __filename})
export class FibWorker extends WorkerJob {
  fib(num: number): number {
    if (num === 0 || num === 1) {
      return num;
    }
    return this.fib(num - 1) + this.fib(num - 2);
  }
 
  receive(data: number, from: string) {
    const result = this.fib(data);
    this.reply(result, from);
  }
}

// index.ts
import {spawn} from 'worker-link';
import {FibWorker} from './fib-worker';
 
for (let i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
  const fw = spawn(FibWorker);
  fw.send(43)
    .then((res) => console.log(`[${i}] fib(43) = ${res}`))
    .finally(() => fw.exit());
}

Remember: you need to compile first because the decorator @worker uses the __filename injected reference. The code uses all threads of an AMD Ryzen 7 processor:

Example with JavaScript

// ./simple-worker.js
const {worker, WorkerJob} = require('worker-link');
 
class SimpleWorker extends WorkerJob {
  receive(data) {
    console.log('receive data:', data);
 
    this.reply('OK!');
  }
}
 
module.exports = worker({filename: __filename})(SimpleWorker);

Then create another file:

// ./index.js
const {spawn} = require('worker-link');
const SimpleWorker = require('./simple-worker');
 
const sw = spawn(SimpleWorker);
 
sw.send('hello!').then((data) => console.log('received from thread:', data));

Then run with node:

$ node index.js

You should see the following message in your terminal:

$ node index.js
 
receive data: hello!
received from thread: OK!
 

You terminal will be stuck at here, because the thread is running and waiting for more messages. To end a process you need to call the exit method when the promise terminate:

// ./index.js
const {spawn} = require('worker-link');
const SimpleWorker = require('./simple-worker');
 
const sw = spawn(SimpleWorker);
 
sw.send('hello!')
  .then((data) => console.log('received from thread:', data))
  .finally(() => sw.exit());

Now run the node index.js again and your terminal will be released after the thread reply:

$ node index.js
 
receive data: hello!
received from thread: OK!
 
$

How it works?

All thread-classes should extend of the WorkerJob class because this class implements the reply method, used to respond when a given message is received.

In TypeScript you can decorate the thread-class with the worker function, or you can compose it, as the way that it works with JavaScript.

When you spawn a thread-class the method send is exposed and you can send any type of messages to that class and wait for the response. The send method returns a Promise, so it's easy to handle the thread result.

All spawned thread-class does not terminate when respond to a given message, if you need to terminate a thread, you can call the method exit.

Roadmap

• Spawn classes as threads.
• Spawn classes wrapped in supervisors.
• Spawn supervisors wrapped in supervisors creating the supervisor tree.
• Better Typescript support