Is there really a benefit to using a worker?

[gruhn]

Is there really a benefit to using a worker?

[stefansundin]

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the reply.

[gruhn]

The usual argument is: everything outside the web worker is running on the UI thread. If you do a lot of computation on the UI thread it blocks rendering and the website gets sluggish. If there’s a memory leak it won’t just kill the web worker but crash the whole website.

I don’t have any empirical evidence for that. I basically just accept this argument. But its certainly a pain to deal with the web worker.

On the subject of scope: Native BarcodeDetector implementations don’t run on the UI thread. That’s why you have to await after a detect call. In that sense I think using a web worker in a polyfill is closer to the native implementation. That can be discussed but I don’t agree that polyfills shouldn’t use web workers in general. Would you also say polyfills should never use the fetch API?