Passing objects to a web worker

There are a few reasons why the error that you mention could have been thrown, the reasons are listed here.

When sending objects to web workers, the object is serialized, and later deserialized in the web worker if the object is a serializable object.

This means that the methods for the objects you send to your web worker are not something that can be passed to the web worker (causing the error that you have run into), and you will need to provide the necessary methods/functions to the objects on the web worker's side of the environment, and make sure they are not part of the object that is passed to the web worker(s).

As you suspected objects with functions cannot be posted. The same goes for objects with recursive references, but this has changed in some browsers lately. Instead of risking doing manual and costly redundant serialization for every post you can perform a test at the beginning of your script to determine which functions to use for sending/receiving data.

I've had the same problem and solved it by moving almost all code into the worker and just keeping a renderer (wrapping the 2d context renderer) in the main thread. In the worker I serialize the different draw calls meant for the canvas into just numbers in an (typed) array. This array is then posted to the main thread.

So for instance when I want to draw an image I invoke the drawImage() method on my worker renderer instance in the worker. The call is translated into something like [13,1,50,40] which corresponds to the draw method enum, image unique id and its xy coordinates. Multiple calls are buffered and put in the same array. At the end of the update loop the array is posted to the main thread. The receiving main renderer instance parses the array and perform the appropriate draw calls.

I recently encountered this same problem when using web workers. Anything I passed to my worker kept all its properties but mysteriously lost all its methods.

You will have to define the methods in the web worker script itself. One workaround is to importScripts the class definition and manually set the __proto__ property of anything you receive. In my case I wanted to pass a grid object, defined in grid.js (yup, I was working on 2048), and did it like so:

importScripts('grid.js')

onMessage = function(e) {
  e.data.grid.__proto__ = Grid.prototype;
  ...
}

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.