Scheduling APIs: scheduler.postTask

[shaseley]

Request for Mozilla Position on an Emerging Web Specification

• Specification Title: Prioritized Task Scheduling
• Specification or proposal URL: https://wicg.github.io/scheduling-apis/
• Caniuse.com URL (optional):
• Bugzilla URL (optional):
• Mozillians who can provide input (optional): Maybe @bdekoz (this API was presented at WebPerf WG a few times).

Other information

• Explainer: https://github.com/WICG/scheduling-apis/blob/main/explainers/prioritized-post-task.md
• Chrome Status entry: https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6031161734201344
• Airbnb blog post about using the API in origin trial: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/building-a-faster-web-experience-with-the-posttask-scheduler-276b83454e91
• Some feedback was given by Boris and addressed in the preliminary TAG review: scheduler.postTask() API w3ctag/design-reviews#338
• A related proposal by a Mozillian: Add promise version setTimeout with AbortSignal support whatwg/html#6201

[annevk]

@smaug---- @Bas-moz @mystor @farre might also have thoughts on this. The API seems reasonable to me. One thing I vaguely recall in relation to this is whether it should reuse more of the setTimeout() semantics when the delay parameter is used. As in, perhaps HTML's timer initialization steps should be generalized so they can be reused here and implementations can apply the same kind of mitigations.

[mystor]

I haven't looked into this too deeply but the API seems reasonable enough on a surface level. Figuring out exactly how this will interact with gecko's event loops and scheduling work may be an interesting issue, but I'd defer to @Bas-moz and @krispyfries as the experts on how our event loops work. I imagine that the biggest part of this review would be when implementing to make sure that the APIs are easy/reasonable for us to implement.

[sefeng211]

I don't think anyone is objecting this API, and I believe @smaug---- and @Bas-moz both agreed that this is worth prototyping.

Can we change the status of this API to worth prototyping?

[annevk]

@sefeng211 yeah, please create a PR. It's probably big enough for a dashboard entry.