Knitting – shared-memory function calls for JavaScript workers

What it is

Knitting is a from-scratch concurrency framework for JavaScript built on shared memory. Instead of manually wiring message protocols, you just call functions across threads.

Why I built it

A couple years ago I was doing a multithreaded simulation in Python. It was slow, so I rewrote it in JS — and then hit workers.

Using postMessage felt like more work than the simulation itself, and it still wasn’t fast.

That left me with a question: why is message passing the default when shared memory already exists?

What’s different

The core idea is simple: make cross-thread calls feel like normal function calls.

call.myTask(args) → returns a Promise, no manual protocol.

Under the hood: - shared-memory request/response mailboxes - atomic slot coordination (no locks) - small payloads inline, larger ones in buffers - Atomics.wait / notify for wakeups

Why it might be interesting

This works best when coordination overhead dominates.

In Deno benchmarks: - ~3.5x faster than postMessage for 1 message - ~9.5x at 25 messages - ~10.7x at 50 messages

There are also Node, Bun, and Tokio comparisons in the docs.

Try it

Docs: https://knittingdocs.netlify.app/ Benchmarks: https://knittingdocs.netlify.app/benchmarks/ GitHub: https://github.com/mimiMonads/knitting

Limitations

- No browser support yet - No pub/sub model - Fixed thread pool size

Feedback

I built this mainly for workloads like HTTP / sockets.

I’m especially interested in: - where this model actually breaks - whether function-call IPC is a dead end or a useful abstraction