Fully type-safe Web Workers with zero boilerplate

Felix Becker

TypeScript and ECMAScript have some of the most beautiful constructs and syntaxes to do parallel, non-blocking programming—but unfortunately, only for standard APIs like fetch in the browser or file IO in Node. When implementing anything CPU-bound in TypeScript, offloading it into a different, parallel execution context and exposing an equally type-safe and flexible API for it is non-trivial.

At the 2019 TSConf pre-meetup in Seattle, I presented the different options for implementing parallel APIs in userland, starting from any-typed message passing, to utilizing advanced TypeScript features such as mapped types, conditional types and function parameter tuple types to support remote procedure calls, fully-flexible property access, and live references to mutable objects.

After watching this talk, you'll have learned how to implement truly-parallel CPU-bound APIs in userland, and how to expose them to other threads, Node processes or even over the network in a fully type-safe manner, all with zero boilerplate code.

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