Co-operative Multithreading and the Component Model

Sy Brand - Fastly

Cross-language concurrent programming is challenging and messy; high-level features like async/await or coroutines do not compose across the language barrier, so programmers must drop into lower-level programming patterns that are harder to reason about, less productive, and more error-prone. Additionally, many existing codebases rely on multithreading in a way that doesn’t necessitate true parallelism, but that WebAssembly tooling doesn’t provide sufficient support for.

The WebAssembly Component Model now specifies features for asynchronous programming and co-operative multithreading. These will ease the burden of cross-language concurrency and provide a stepping-stone to support multithreaded applications.

Come along to learn about the design of the feature, the current state of tooling, and current work ongoing in the space.