Add readAsSharedArrayBuffer to FileReader

[topicus]

To allow workers play with file contents currently you have three options (maybe more):

• Post a message to the worker with the File (structured cloning is costly).
• Read the file as an array buffer and transfer it to the worker context (it's no longer accesible from other contexts).
• Read the file as an array buffer and copy it's contents to a shared array buffer (still a copy is needed).

If you need to parallelize tasks over file contents (e.g. parsing a big csv file) there is no way to do it without perform a copy which is costly operation when you deal with large files.

It would be great to have a readAsSharedArrayBuffer to read the file straight in a shared array buffer and thus avoid the copy.

Is there any other way to perform this with the current specs that I'm missing?

Sorry if this is not the right place for this proposal.

[littledan]

I think the right place for this proposal would be against the FileAPI at https://github.com/w3c/FileAPI/issues . This specification is just for the JavaScript side, not any associated I/O libraries.

[topicus]

@littledan Thank you, moving this.