Javascript Distributed Computing [closed]

Answer 1

I think that Web Workers will soon be used to create distributed computing frameworks, there are some early attempts at this concept. Non-blocking code execution could have been done before using setTimeout, but it made a little sense as most browser vendors focused on optimizing their JS engines just recently. Now we have faster code execution and new features, so running some tasks unconsciously in background as we browse the web is probably just a matter of months ;)

Answer 2

I have pondered this myself in the context of item recommendation.

First, there is no problem with speed! JIT compiled javascript can be as fast as unoptimized C, especially for numeric code.

The bigger problem is that running javascript in the background will slow down the browser and therefore users may not like your website because it runs slowly.

There is obviously an issue of security, how can you verify the results?

And privacy, can you ensure sensitive data isn't compromised?

On top of this, it's quite a difficult thing to do. Can the number of visits you receive justify the effort that you'll have to put into it? It would be better if you could run the code transparently on either the server or client-side. Compiling other languages to javascript can help here.

In summary, the reason that it's not widespread is because developers' time is more valuable than server time. The risk of losing user data and the inconvenience to users outweighs the potential gains.

Answer 3

I found a question similar to this a while back, so I built a thingy that does this. It uses web workers and fetches scripts dynamically (but no Eval!). Web workers sandbox the scripts so they cannot access the window or the DOM. You can see the code here, and the main website here

The library has a consent popup on first load, so the user knows what's going on in the background.