Workers

Workers run code that won't block the "main thread" controlling the user interface. If you block the main thread, your web page becomes annoyingly unresponsive. You should never block the main thread.

Happily, PyScript makes it very easy to use workers and uses a feature recently added to web standards called Atomics.

HTTP headers

For Atomics to work you must ensure your web server enables the following headers (this is the default behaviour for pyscript.com):

Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-origin
Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: require-corp
Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy: cross-origin

If you are not able to configure your server's headers, use the mini-coi project to achieve the same end.

Start working

To start your code in a worker, simply ensure the <script>, <py-script> or <mpy-script> tag pointing to the code you want to run has a worker attribute flag:

Evaluating code in a worker

<script type="py" src="./my-worker-code.py" worker></script>

Code running in the worker needs to be able to access the web page running in the main thread. This is achieved via builtin helper utilities described in the next section.

Note

For ease of use, the worker related functionality in PyScript is a simpler presentation of more sophisticated and powerful behaviour available via PolyScript.

If you are a confident advanced user, please consult the XWorker related documentation from the PolyScript project for how to make use of these features.