Access a shared worker from a dedicated worker

Question

Is it possible to access a shared worker created in the main thread in a dedicated worker created by that same main thread? My initial thoughts are no as this could cause a lot of concurrency issues, but I don't have a full understanding of the internals of WebWorkers yet to decide definitively.

My use case would be to have a dedicated worker open up a web socket channel with the server to retrieve a streaming data source. This data would then be sent into a shared worker that will provide functions to manipulate it and return results via transferable objects. I do not want to combine these objects into a single worker since I want to be able to plug in different modules for doing the data manipulation, and do not want to have to duplicate the code to talk with the web socket.

Answer 1

Is it possible to access a shared worker created in the main thread in a dedicated worker created by that same main thread?

Yes. Just create a SharedWorker as a sub-worker (and it will be shared), or create a MessageChannel between the shared and the dedicated worker.

this could cause a lot of concurrency issues

No. Inter-Worker communication is evented and asynchronous.

This data would then be sent into a shared worker that will provide functions to manipulate

That doesn't sound as if you needed a shared worker for that. For "providing functions", a simple library that is loaded into the dedicated worker (which does the websocket communication) will suffice. You might even load libraries dynamically, using some kine of dependency management in the worker. There's no need to duplicate the web socket code.