Passing objects to a web worker

Question

I\'m trying to pass an object to a web worker through the postMessage function.
This object is a square that has a couple of functions to draw himself on a canvas and so

Answer 1

When you pass data to a web worker, a copy of the data is made with the structured clone algorithm. It is specified in HTML5 (see § 2.9: Safe passing of structured data).

MDN has an overview of supported types. As functions are not supported, trying to clone objects containing functions will therefore throw a DATA_CLONE_ERR exception.

What to do if you have an object with functions?

• If the functions are not relevant, try to create a new object that contains only the data that you want to transfer. As long as you use only supported types, send should work. Using JSON.stringify and JSON.parse can also be used as a workaround, as stringify ignores functions.

• If the functions are relevant, there is no portable way. There are attempts to use a combination of toString and eval (e.g., used by the jsonfs library), but this will not work in all cases. For instances, it will break if your function is native code. Also closures are problematic.