Javascript Defer

It would be nice to have a browser native delay function that added 
a function to the call stack to be run immediately, but not blocking 
UI, similar to 

> setTimeout(func, 0).

Currently prototype does this - prototype.function.defer sets a 
timeout of 0.01.

In my experience though, setting a timeout has a delay - Resig's 
experiments seem to confirm: 
> http://ejohn.org/blog/analyzing-timer-performance/

It'd be nice if 
> window.defer(func)
 was isomorphic to
> window.setTimeout(func, 0.01) 
so that older browsers could be supported, but code ran much faster 
with the defer code.

Is this a good idea? Is there a way to do this currently?

Mr Boehmer,

Thanks - I hadn't realised Ben had investigated the delay.

I've played with worker threads, and whilst pretty cool, they're a hassle to implement because of the message passing.

The goal with this would be to stop the browser locking up on large loops - I find myself reimplementing the same chunk processing code and then trying to tune the timeout to be as quick as possible. Ideally I could just pass an iterable to a map function, and using this delay function it would ensure that the loop doesn't block the browser's thread.

So not as much background processing as splitting up foreground processing.

P

Mr Boehmer,

Thanks - I hadn't realised Ben had investigated the delay.

I've played with worker threads, and whilst pretty cool, they're a hassle to implement because of the message passing.

The goal with this would be to stop the browser locking up on large loops - I find myself reimplementing the same chunk processing code and then trying to tune the timeout to be as quick as possible. Ideally I could just pass an iterable to a map function, and using this delay function it would ensure that the loop doesn't block the browser's thread.

So not as much background processing as splitting up foreground processing.

P