bevy/crates/bevy_tasks
Joseph ee15be8549
Make Tasks functional on WASM (#13889)
# Objective

Right not bevy's task pool abstraction is kind of useless on wasm, since
it returns a `FakeTask` which can't be interacted with. This is only
good for fire-and-forget it tasks, and isn't even that useful since it's
just a thin wrapper around `wasm-bindgen-futures::spawn_local`

## Solution

Add a simple `Task<T>` handler type to wasm targets that allow waiting
for a task's output or periodically checking for its completion. This PR
aims to give the wasm version of these tasks feature parity with the
native, multi-threaded version of the task

## Testing

- Did you test these changes? *Not yet*

---------

Co-authored-by: Periwink <charlesbour@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Jan Hohenheim <jan@hohenheim.ch>
2024-07-16 01:15:03 +00:00
..
examples Inverse missing_docs logic (#11676) 2024-02-03 21:40:55 +00:00
src Make Tasks functional on WASM (#13889) 2024-07-16 01:15:03 +00:00
Cargo.toml Make Tasks functional on WASM (#13889) 2024-07-16 01:15:03 +00:00
README.md add and fix shields in Readmes (#9993) 2023-10-15 00:52:31 +00:00

Bevy Tasks

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A refreshingly simple task executor for bevy. :)

This is a simple threadpool with minimal dependencies. The main usecase is a scoped fork-join, i.e. spawning tasks from a single thread and having that thread await the completion of those tasks. This is intended specifically for bevy as a lighter alternative to rayon for this specific usecase. There are also utilities for generating the tasks from a slice of data. This library is intended for games and makes no attempt to ensure fairness or ordering of spawned tasks.

It is based on async-executor, a lightweight executor that allows the end user to manage their own threads. async-executor is based on async-task, a core piece of async-std.

Usage

In order to be able to optimize task execution in multi-threaded environments, bevy provides three different thread pools via which tasks of different kinds can be spawned. (The same API is used in single-threaded environments, even if execution is limited to a single thread. This currently applies to WASM targets.) The determining factor for what kind of work should go in each pool is latency requirements:

  • For CPU-intensive work (tasks that generally spin until completion) we have a standard [ComputeTaskPool] and an [AsyncComputeTaskPool]. Work that does not need to be completed to present the next frame should go to the [AsyncComputeTaskPool].

  • For IO-intensive work (tasks that spend very little time in a "woken" state) we have an [IoTaskPool] whose tasks are expected to complete very quickly. Generally speaking, they should just await receiving data from somewhere (i.e. disk) and signal other systems when the data is ready for consumption. (likely via channels)