Jon
Jon

Reputation: 25

Is it possible to pass a Comlink-proxied object to a proxied function?

This question relates to the Comlink WebWorker library and specifically to the usage of Comlink.proxy. Consider the following situation:

worker.ts

import * as Comlink from 'comlink';

export class Foo { ... }

export class Bar {
    makeFoo () {
        return Comlink.proxy(new Foo);
    }
    useFoo (foo: Foo) { ... }
}

Comlink.expose(Bar);

main.ts

import type { Foo, Bar } from './worker.ts';
import * as Comlink from 'comlink';

const worker = new Worker('./worker.ts');
const bar: Comlink.Remote<Bar> = await new Comlink.wrap(worker);
const foo: Comlink.Remote<Foo> = await bar.makeFoo();

await bar.useFoo(foo);

Up until the last line there, everything works as expected: foo and bar on the main thread are proxies to Foo and Bar instances that live on the worker, respectively. The last line (await bar.useFoo(foo)) is where issues arise; the intention is for the proxy to get automatically unwrapped and to receive the unproxied Foo instance back on the worker side, but as-written this instead results in an error (obj is undefined).

Is there a way to achieve this within the bounds of what Comlink offers?

The alternative would be to never expose a proxied Foo to the main thread at all and instead rely on a layer of indirection, by assigning and returning unique IDs/handles to individual Foo instances created via makeFoo and passing those to useFoo. The main disadvantage of such an approach is the obvious complexity increase, especially as Foo's public API grows:

// with a proxy:
await foo.method1(arg1, arg2);
await foo.method2(arg1);
// with a handle:
await bar.fooMethod1(fooHandle, arg1, arg2);
await bar.fooMethod2(fooHandle, arg1);

Upvotes: 0

Views: 32

Answers (0)

Related Questions