Functions, timing, calling in order and global variables - javascript

I have 2 functions called one after the other, x and y are global variables.
function setVariables() {
x = 2;
y = 10;
};
function useVariables() {
console.log(x);
console.log(y);
};
Say I call these two functions in a document ready function one after the other. Is setVariables guaranteed to "finish" before useVariables is called? Or, given that setVariables could be long and take some time to run, could you end up in a situation where useVariables tries to use these global variables before setVariables has had a chance to set them?

JavaScript is single-threaded. It's not possible to have code running in parallel. The two functions will always execute in sequence.
It's important to distinguish between parallelism and asynchrony.
Parallelism is the possibility of code running simultaneously in different threads or different processes. When you have parallelism, you have to start worrying about race conditions and synchronization of shared state.
As a single-threaded language, parallelism does not come into play in JavaScript.†
Asynchrony is the ability to have code run in an unpredictable order at unpredictable times. If you use setTimeout or setup AJAX callbacks or register event handlers, you don't have a guarantee of ordering. When you register multiple timeout callbacks, for instance, you should not assume they execute in one particular order.
Asynchrony does not necessarily mean that code will execute in parallel. In other languages it might, but in JavaScript it won't. You don't have to be concerned about variables you're using in one event handler being changed by some other event handler. While your code is running, it is the only code running.
† Web workers complicate the answer. Web workers provide parallelism by allowing work to be done in background threads. These threads can only interface with the main thread via asynchronous events, though. There is no shared data. The main thread does not otherwise see these background threads. It can still safely pretend the world is single-threaded.

setVariables()
useVariables()
setVariables() shall and will always be executed and finished before the next line (useVariables()) is executed.

Related

Why does Javascript have much fewer blocking functions than Python

Moving from Javascript to Python, and looking at asyncio has me a little confused.
As someone who is new to the fundamental concepts of concurrency, I just assumed a superficial understanding of Javascript concurrency.
A basic understanding from using async / await in Javascript:
If we run any processes inside an async function, and await the response of the function, we are essentially waiting for the function to set a value on the Promise.
Makes total sense - when the Promise is given a value, we can also use callbacks such as .then() to handle the response. Alternatively, just await.
Whatever the underlying implementation of asynchronicity here is (for example all processes running on a single thread with an event loop), should it matter how we interface with it?
Now, I move to Python and start playing with asyncio. We have Futures, just like Promises. All of a sudden, I can't use my standard libraries, such as request.get(...), but I need to use non blocking network requests in libraries such as aiohttp.
What does blocking / non-blocking mean here? I assume it means the single thread that the event loop is on is blocked, so we cant process other functions in parallel.
So my 2 questions then are:
What causes the single thread to be blocked? For example in requests.get(...)
Why are most functions non-blocking in Javascript, but not in Python (i.e we don't need specific libraries such as aiohttp).
And what about languages like Go with their goroutines? Is it just a case because its a new language with concurrency built in from the beginning, that the concept of blocking functions don't exist. Or in Go it's not a single thread, so everything can inherently be parallelised?
Thanks :)
Event loop
Javascript, and python's async io make use of a concurrency model based on event loops.
(Note the plural because you could have multiple event loops which handle different kinds of tasks e.g. disk io, network io, ipc, parallel computations etc)
The general concept of an event loop is that, you have a number of things to do, so you put those things in a queue, and once in a while (like every nanosecond), the event loop picks an event from the queue, and runs it for a short while (maybe a millisecond or so), and either shoves it back in the queue if it hasn't completed, or waits until it yields control back to the event loop.
Now to answer some of your questions:
What does blocking / non-blocking mean here? I assume it means the
single thread that the event loop is on is blocked, so we cant process
other functions in parallel.
Blocking event loop
Blocking the event loop occurs when the event loop is running a task, and the task has either not finished or given back control to the event-loop, for a period of time longer than the event loop has scheduled it to run.
In the case of python's requests library, they make use of a synchronous http library, which doesn't respect the event loop; Therefore, running such a task in the loop will starve other tasks which are patiently waiting their turn to run, until the request is finished.
Why are most functions non-blocking in Javascript, but not in Python
(i.e we don't need specific libraries such as aiohttp).
JS
Everything in Javascript can block the event loop. The only way not to block the event loop is to make heavy use of callbacks via setTimeout. However, if care is not taken, even those callbacks can block the event loop if they run too long without yielding control back to the event loop via another setTimeout call.
(If you've never had to use setTimeout, but have used promises and async network requests in JS, then you are probably making use of a library that does. Most of the popular networking libraries used in browsers (ajax, axios, fetch, etc), are based on the popular XMLHttpRequest API, which provides async network IO.)
Python
In python, the story is slightly different: Before asyncio, there was no such thing as as "event loop". Everything must run to completion before python interpreter moves on to the next thing. This is part of what makes python very easy to learn (and dare I say, to create...). The reason for this, comes in the form of the python GIL, which in simple terms enforces a single order of execution for any python program. I encourage you to click that link, and read why the GIL exists.
And what about languages like Go with their goroutines?
Note: I am not a go programmer, but I read something
How is Go different?
The only difference between the way go handles goroutines and how python asyncio/js do their event loops, is that go makes more use of os threads to ensure that threads are scheduled fairly and make full use of the machine they run in.
While js callbacks/asyncio tasks will often run in the same thread as the event loop, goroutines are able to run in seperate OS threads and over multiple cores, thus giving them higher availability and higher parallelism. (In that case, we could almost consider goroutines to be closer to OS threads in terms of how much time they actually get to run, as compared to green threads which are bound by the amount of time the event loop's thread runs.)

Multithreading javascript

I want to create a real thread which manages some operations in javascript.
After several search, i found 'Web Workers', 'setTimeout' or 'setInterval'.
The problem is that 'Web Workers' don't have access to global variables and therefore can't modify my global arrays directly (or i do not know how).
'setTimeout' is not really what i need.
'setInterval' sets my problem, however it is probably that after many times my operations could last longer. Therefore i am afraid that two interval overlaps.
Finally i need a infinite loop which executes a series of operations once after another. Does it exist or do I have to content myself with 'setInterval'? Is there an alternative with jQuery or other? If it is not, is what I can expect in the near future to see the developer make it available?
I'm going to assume you're talking about in a web browser.
JavaScript in web browsers has a single main UI thread, and then zero or more web worker threads. Web workers are indeed isolated from the main UI thread (and each other) and so don't have access to globals (other than their own). This is intentional, it makes both implementing the environment and using it dramatically simpler and less error-prone. (Even if that isolation weren't enforced, it's good practice for multi-threaded programming anyway.) You send messages to, and receive messages from, web workers via postMessage and the message event.
JavaScript threads (the main UI thread and any web workers) work via a thread-specific task queue (aka "job queue"): Anything that needs to happen on a JavaScript thread (the initial run of the code when a page loads, handling of an event, timer callbacks [more below]) adds a task to the queue. The JavaScript engine runs a loop: Pick up the next task, run it, pick up the next, run it, etc. When there are no tasks, the thread goes quiet waiting for a task to arrive.
setTimeout doesn't create a separate thread, it just schedules a task (a call to a callback) to be added to the task queue for that same thread after a delay (the timeout). Once the timeout occurs, the task is queued, and when the task reaches the front of the queue the thread will handle it.
setInterval does exactly what setTimeout does, but schedules a recurring callback: Once the timeout occurs, it queues the task, then sets up another timeout to queue the task again later. (The rules around the timing are a bit complex.)
If you just want something to recur, forever, at intervals, and you want that thing to have access to global variables in the main UI thread, then you either:
Use setInterval once, which will set up recurring calls back to your code, or
Use setTimeout, and every time you get your callback, use setTimeout again to schedule the next one.
From your description, it sounds as though you may be calling setInterval more than once (for instance, on each callback), which quickly bogs down the thread as you're constantly telling it to do more and more work.
The last thing is easy: webworker start their work when they get a message to (onmessage) and sit idle otherwise. (that's highly simplified, of course).
Global variables are not good for real multi-threading and even worse with the reduced thing JavaScript offers. You have to rewrite your workers to work standalone with only the information given.
Subworkers have a messaging system which you might be able to make good use of.
But the main problem with JavaScript is: once asynchronous always asynchronous. There is no way to "join" threads or a "wait4" or something similar. The only thing that can do both is the XMLHttprequest, so you can do it over a webserver but I doubt the lag that causes would do any good. BTW: synchronous XMLHttprequest is deprecated says Mozilla which also has a page listing all of the way where a synchronous request is necessary or at least very useful.

Are JavaScript functions asynchronous?

Consider the following function being executed,
function loadPage()
{
takeInput();
processInput();
outputInput();
}
In what order would they be executed(I have read that it follows stack so option 2 will be the answer)?
Option #1
takeInput();
processInput();
outputInput();
Option #2
outputInput();
processInput();
takeInput();
JavaScript functions are not asynchronous. Some very limited set of functions have an asynchronous API:
addEventListener, setTimeout, setInterval. These are the only 3 (which I thought was very surprising).
They allow you to pass in a callback that may get called eventually. Such as when a timer expires, or when a user clicks on something, or when an AJAX request completes.
JavaScript has an event loop. The event loop processes each event as it comes in. If you click a button 3 times and then a timer expires that will also be the order the events are handled. It is all very well defined and determined.
Furthermore, JavaScript doesn't have threads, it runs one event completely till there is nothing left to do (you return) before starting the next event. So events will never interfere in any way. This allows you to make very strong assumptions about the state of your data.
Are JavaScript functions asynchronous?
Some are, most are not.
In what order would they be executed
They will be executed in the order in which they are called. Since they are are all called from the same function, that will be in a simple linear order.
If any of them are written in an asynchronous way, then they might not finish all their activity in the same order. For example:
function a() {
console.log('a');
}
function b() {
console.log('b');
}
function c() {
console.log('c');
}
function aAsync() {
setTimeout(a, 500);
}
function load() {
aAsync();
b();
c();
}
load();
Javascript is not Asynchronous. It works Synchronously ,that is it runs one line of code at a time.
When javascript code is run , first a Global execution context is created and if you call a function from global execution context, another execution context is created by the javascript engine and that is placed at the top of the execution stack (global execution context is already in the stack)and if there is another function being called from inside that function ,another execution context is created and stack size keeps on increasing.
So,javascript engine keeps running this code one line at a time and in that process if there is any event/ http request fires, the browser puts them in the EVENT QUEUE. So, the point is javascript engine wont process the events in queue until the execution stack is empty.
And when the engine is done with the execution stack, it periodically looks if there is any event handler for current event in queue and similarly creates execution context for that handler and runs the code within.
So, the whole process is just synchronous and asynchronousity is just handled by the other parts of browser like(rendering engine or http engine) while the javascript engine continues to run the code synchronously.
So, in your case,
from whichever context function loadpage was invoked , its execution context was created and and placed at the top of the stack. Then, it invokes the takeinput function, its exec. context is created and and other functions context will not be created and placed in the stack until the takeinput context is popped out from the execution stack.
So, the correct order will be takeinput, processinput and outputinput.
I hope it answers your question.
JavaScript is not, generally asynchronous, but it does have asynchronous and event driven methods.
Ajax calls are the big asynchronous methods.
For events, I'm not sure that you can be guaranteed about an order of execution, but I might be wrong about that.
No, not by default/as standard, though there are asynchronous methods. And jQuery makes use of asynchronous behaviour much more so. But in each case, it's subjective, and can't be said that "All of the JavaScript is this or that".
Methods are always executed in the order they are called; the asynchronousness of them means that any may complete before another, even if called afterwards.
Javascript is a single-threaded beast, so strictly speaking tasks are not asynchronous as one might think of in terms of spawning child threads to execute code. The mechanisms that provide this create the illusion of asynchronicity, but its still single-threaded.

Race conditions with JavaScript event handling?

We understand that JavaScript is single threaded, but we want to confirm our understanding of asynchronous event handling in JavaScript. More importantly, we want to confirm we're not exposed to potential race conditions.
Conceptually, our mobile app works like this:
We invoke function foo when a mobile page is loaded.
At the end of foo, we use setTimeout to invoke foo again (with one second delay) if a counter is greater than 0. If the counter hits 0, we load a new page. The timeout is saved in a variable.
If a button is tapped, we invoke function do_tap and clear the timeout variable saved in step two (and do other stuff).
do_tap and foo both update the same page element, and we want to confirm that they wouldn't step on each other.
Questions:
Assume a tap occurs during the execution of foo. Will the browser queue do_tap to start executing after foo finishes? In other words, are we guaranteed that once foo starts, we can never see execution of foo and do_tap interleaved?
What if the tap occurs first? do_tap is guaranteed to complete before foo starts, right?
Except for web workers and cooperating frames or windows (which aren't being used here), Javascript is single threaded within a given window so there are never two threads of execution running at the same time in that window. As such, you don't ever have to worry about race conditions that might be a typical worry when using threads.
Under the covers, Javascript has an event queue. Your current thread of execution will run to completion and then when it completes, the javascript interpreter will check the event queue to see if there are more things to do. If so, it fires that event and starts up another thread of execution. Pretty much everything goes through that event queue (timers, key events, resize events, mouse events, etc...).
You can read more about it and see a bunch of relevant references in one of my other answers on this subject.
Event execution proceeds single-threaded until the event has been handled. Until that time, no other event loop will be initiated.
In other words, while a handler is running for some event, no other handler for any other event will interrupt it.
Thus the answer to both question 1 and question 2 is "Yes." (This is, of course, barring browser bugs, but if you take that into account you can't get very far. It's not like there are any synchronization primitives to fall back on. I say this only because there was a period of time during which Safari could fire a "DOMready" event in the middle of running another "DOMready" event handler. That was, however, quite clearly a bug.)
As long as the first thing Do_tap() does is clearTimeout there will be no chance for foo to be running during the execution of Do_tap(). However, if an asynchronous process was initiated in foo() such a database request then there could be a potential wait to access the database in Do_tap() as foo() finishes its request, and if foo() has a callback function that could theoretically be called after Do_tap() was done executing.
I didn't catch anyone else saying this, but I think the answer to #2 is that different browser implementations can and do differ in subtle ways as to which queued events are processed first. No, there is no possibility of interleaving, but whether setTimeout(func, 0) or a mouse event is handled first is not guaranteed by the language spec and in practice can matter. Whereas setTimeout(func, 100) is guaranteed to be processed later than pending events received during the currently handled event.
Just saying.

JavaScript and single-threadedness

I always hear that JavaScript is single-threaded; that when JavaScript is executed, it's all run in the same global mosh pit, all in a single thread.
While that may be true, that single execution thread may spawn new threads, asynchronousy reqeiving data back to the main thread, correct? For example, when an XMLHttpRequest is sent, doesn't the browser create a new thread that performs the HTTP transaction, then invoke callbacks back in the main thread when the XMLHttpRequest returns?
What about timers--setTimeout and setInterval? How do those work?
Is this single-threadedness the result of the language? What has stopped JavaScript from having multi-threaded execution before the new Web Workers draft?
XMLHttpRequest, notably, does not block the current thread. However, its specifics within the runtime are not outlined in any specification. It may run in a separate thread or within the current thread, making use of non-blocking I/O.
setTimeout and setInterval set timers that, when run down to zero, add an item for execution, either a line of code of a function/callback, to the execution stack, starting the JavaScript engine if code execution has stopped. In other words, they tell the JavaScript engine to do something after it has finished doing whatever it's doing currently. To see this in action, set multiple setTimeout(s) within one method and call it.
Your JavaScript itself is single-threaded. It may, however, interact with other threads in the browser (which is frequently written with something like C and C++). This is how asynchronous XHR's work. The browser may create a new thread (or it may re-use an existing one with an event loop.)
Timers and intervals will try to make your JavaScript run later, but if you have a while(1){ ; } running don't expect a timer or interval to interrupt it.
(edit: left something out.)
The single-threadedness is largely a result of the ECMA specification. There's really no language constructs for dealing with multiple threads. It wouldn't be impossible to write a JavaScript interpreter with multiple threads and the tools to interact with them, but no one really does that. Certainly no one will do it in a web browser; it would mess everything up. (If you're doing something server-side like Node.js, you'll see that they have eschewed multithreading in the JavaScript proper in favor of a snazzy event loop, and optional multi-processing.)
See this post for a description of how the javascript event queue works, including how it's related to ajax calls.
The browser certainly uses at least one native OS thread/process to handle the actual interface to the OS to retrieve system events (mouse, keyboard, timers, network events, etc...). Whether there is more than one native OS-level thread is dependent upon the browser implementation and isn't really relevant to Javascript behavior. All events from the outside world go through the javascript event queue and no event is processed until a previous javascript thread of execution is completed and the next event is then pulled from the queue given to the javascript engine.
Browser may have other threads to do the job but your Javascript code will still be executed in one thread. Here is how it would work in practice.
In case of time out, browser will create a separate thread to wait for time out to expire or use some other mechanism to implement actual timing logic. Then timeout expires, the message will be placed on main event queue that tells the runtime to execute your handler. and that will happen as soon as message is picked up by main thread.
AJAX request would work similarly. Some browser internal thread may actually connect to server and wait for the response and once response is available place appropriate message on main event queue so main thread executes the handler.
In all cases your code will get executed by main thread. This is not different from most other UI system except that browser hides that logic from you. On other platforms you may need to deal with separate threads and ensure execution of handlers on UI thread.
Putting it more simply than talking in terms of threads, in general (for the browsers I'm aware of) there will only be one block of JavaScript executing at any given time.
When you make an asynchronous Ajax request or call setTimeout or setInterval the browser may manage them in another thread, but the actual JS code in the callbacks will not execute until some point after the currently executing block of code finishes. It just gets queued up.
A simple test to demonstrate this is if you put a piece of relatively long running code after a setTimeout but in the same block:
setTimeout("alert('Timeout!');", 5);
alert("After setTimeout; before loop");
for (var i=0, x=0; i < 2000000; i++) { x += i };
alert("After loop");
If you run the above you'll see the "After setTimeout" alert, then there'll be a pause while the loop runs, then you'll see "After loop", and only after that will you see "Timeout!" - even though clearly much longer than 5ms has passed (especially if you take a while to close the first alert).
An often-quoted reason for the single-thread is that it simplifies the browser's job of rendering the page, because you don't get the situation of lots of different threads of JavaScript all trying to update the DOM at the same time.
Javascript is a language designed to be embedded. It can and has been used in programs that execute javascript concurrently on different operating threads. There isn't much demand for an embedded language to explicitly control the creation of new threads of execution, but it could certainly be done by providing a host object with the required capabilities. The WHATWG actually includes a justification for their decision not to push a standard concurrent execution capability for browsers.

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