Can JavaScript Go Faster? Threading in JavaScript (Data Structures & Optimization) @simondev758

Uploaded August 2021 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

Can you make JavaScript run even faster? Or is it limited as a single thread language?

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In this video we talk a bit about JavaScript's mechanisms for concurrency and spreading the work out over multiple threads/cores. We'll cover the web worker API in a bit of detail, dedicated workers, and then we'll move on to creating a small testing setup. It's kind of interesting to explore the threading opportunities that JavaScripts offers through the Web Worker API, the various pitfalls and performance footguns that lurk there, and what you can do to mitigate these issues. We'll also explore using transferable objects with ArrayBuffer, and touch quickly on what SharedArrayBuffer unlocks in terms of concurrency and multiple threads reading/writing.

Links:
developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers_API
https://surma.dev/
https://surma.dev/things/is-postmessage-slow/
https://v8.dev/docs/embed
developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/SharedArrayBuffer
developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Worker/postMessage
developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers_API/Structured_clone_algorithm
developers.google.com/web/updates/2011/12/Transferable-Objects-Lightning-Fast
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript

And yes, Node also has threads:
nodejs.org/api/worker_threads.html

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$Spatial Hash Grids & Tales from Game Development 🛒 Recommended books (on Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/1IMV0IR3QIZMQ?type=wishlist&tag=simondev01-20&sort=priority&viewType=grid ❤️ Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/simondevyt 🌍 My Gamedev Courses: https://simondev.teachable.com/ Disclaimer: Commission is earned from qualifying purchases on Amazon links. Follow me on: Twitter: https://twitter.com/iced_coffee_dev Github: https://github.com/simondevyoutube/ In this project were covering spatial hash grids, or spatial hashing, people seem to call it all sorts of different names. Anyway, well be covering a spatial hash grid implementation in JavaScript, working through it line by line. Well walk through the code step by step, explaining it as we go, and as an added bonus, Ive implemented a small scene in Three.js with hundreds of moving agents that we can use to visualize whats visible from the perspective of any given agent. Ill also tell a small but interesting little story from way back when I was working on xbox/playstation games. Somewhat related to the topic. Having a comprehensive understanding of data structures is fundamental to being a solid game developer. You need to understand the trade-offs, not just in time complexity. Questions like memory consumption, implementation and on-going maintenance costs, these all factor in. Sometimes simple solutions, implemented well, that get you 95% of the way there but at a fraction of the developer cost, are the way to go. The three.js library is available in JavaScript for cross-browser 3d graphics, wrapping webgl and making high level functionality available in the web browser. It’s an extremely mature and well maintained library that I use for many of these videos. In the video, we cover: * What problem are we trying to solve? Well look at examples from major games to understand their needs in different situations. * Well touch on alternative spatial data structures, and discuss the tradeoffs. * Ill talk about an instance in my career thats relevant to this problem * Step by step walk through for the full implementation of a basic spatial hash grid.$