ES6 Generators Deliver Go Style Concurrency

Last night I expressed some frustration about the state and future of concurrency in JavaScript. I ended up having a little bit of back and forth with David Herman and he pointed out that ES6 Generators can express Go and core.async’s flavor of CSP. Now I had thought about this in the past but I could not see how. Part of this was that I’d never seen how a CSP system works under the hood (now I have months of core.async development under my belt) and part of it was my distraction over the limitations of combining Generators with Promises.

I’d never considered combining Generators with something else.

What follows is a minimal amount of code that works in Node.js 0.11 with the ES6 harmony command line setting. I’ll explain each part. The insight is to combine Generators with Channels.

This is our low level state machine stepper. machine is the generator and step is the result of calling that generator at least once via next . The result of calling next on a Generator is an object with two fields value , and done .

function go_(machine, step) { while(!step.done) { var arr = step.value(), state = arr[0], value = arr[1]; switch (state) { case "park": setImmediate(function() { go_(machine, step); }); return; case "continue": step = machine.next(value); break; } } }

If the generator is not done we go into a loop. The value should be a function which attempts to do some work and returns an array representing an instruction for the machine. The first value in this array is what the machine should do next. If this value is "park" then we need to queue ourselves for later execution so we can retry the function in step.value .

If instruction is "continue" we call next on the machine with the value portion of the instruction. The yielded process can now continue with the result of computation to the next step.

This is the actual go function users will call, it kicks things off.

function go(machine) { var gen = machine(); go_(gen, gen.next()); }

What are channels? Channels are simply queues and the simplest way to represent them is an array. Here is our first channel operation that asynchronously puts a value onto a channel. Notice that it returns the required instruction needed by go_ . If the channel is empty we can place a value in it, if not we park.

It’s easy to imagine the sophisticated buffering strategies supported by Go and core.async by using something other than arrays for channels.

function put(chan, val) { return function() { if(chan.length == 0) { chan.unshift(val); return ["continue", null]; } else { return ["park", null]; } }; }

Here is a take operation. If we’re attempting to read off an empty channel we’ll park the machine. Otherwise we pop a value off the channel and return a continue instruction to the machine.

function take(chan) { return function() { if(chan.length == 0) { return ["park", null]; } else { var val = chan.pop(); return ["continue", val]; } }; }

It’s possible to do Go’s select or core.async’s alt! but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

We can now write a simple example program. We run two processes in parallel. If you try this in Node.js 0.11 you will see they are interleaved.

var c = []; go(function* () { for(var i = 0; i < 10; i++) { yield put(c, i); console.log("process one put", i); } yield put(c, null); }); go(function* () { while(true) { var val = yield take(c); if(val == null) { break; } else { console.log("process two took", val); } } });

Don’t combine Generators with Promises, combine them with Channels!

With tools like Traceur you can implement many of the ideas from my previous core.async blog posts today in vanilla JavaScript.