Napa.js

Napa.js is a multi-threaded JavaScript runtime built on V8, which was originally designed to develop highly iterative services with non-compromised performance in Bing. As it evolves, we find it useful to complement Node.js in CPU-bound tasks, with the capability of executing JavaScript in multiple V8 isolates and communicating between them. Napa.js is exposed as a Node.js module, while it can also be embedded in a host process without Node.js dependency.

Supported OS and Compilers

Napa.js requires C++ compiler that supports C++14, currently we have tested following OS/compiler combinations:

• Windows: 7+ with VC 2015+ (MSVC14.0+)
• Linux: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 16.04 TLS, with gcc 5.4+
• OSX: 10.11 (Yosemite), Apple LLVM 7.0.2 (clang-700.1.18)

Installation

Prerequisites

• Install C++ compilers that support C++14:
  • Windows: Visual C++ Build Tools 2015 / 2017, or Visual Studio
  • Linux: via Apt-get
  • OSX: xcode-select --install
• Install CMake:
  • Linux: via Apt-get
  • OSX: via brew
  • Download or build
• Install cmake-js: npm install -g cmake-js

Install Napa.js

npm install napajs

* You can also build Napa.js from source.

Quick Start

var napa = require('napajs');
var zone1 = napa.zone.create('zone1', { workers: 4} );

// Broadcast code to all 4 workers in 'zone1'.
zone1.broadcast('console.log("hello world");');

// Execute an anonymous function in any worker thread in 'zone1'.
zone1.execute(
    (text) => {
        return text;
    }, 
    ['hello napa'])
    .then((result) => {
        console.log(result.value);
    });

More examples:

• Estimate PI in parallel
• Recursive Fibonacci with multiple JavaScript threads
• Max sub-matrix of 1s with layered parallelism

Features

• Multi-threaded JavaScript runtime
• Node.js compatible module architecture with NPM support
• API for object transportation, object sharing and synchronization across JavaScript threads
• API for pluggable logging, metric and memory allocator
• Distributed as a Node.js module, as well as supporting embed scenarios

Documentation

• Napa.js Home
• API Reference

Contribute

You can contribute to Napa.js in following ways:

• Report issues and help us verify fixes as they are checked in.
• Review the source code changes.
• Contribute bug fixes.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.

Contacts

• Mailing list