Exploring the world of event listening in JavaScript

There has been much discussion about the single-threaded and asynchronous nature of JavaScript, with mentions of the event loop and callback queue.

One thing I find puzzling is how a single-threaded language can manage to keep track of events and add event handlers to a queue while simultaneously running other code.

For instance, when a button is clicked during the execution of a lengthy loop, its callback is still added to the queue despite the thread being tied up.

Thank you for any insight on this matter.

Answer №1

The operating system, or Javascript in the case of code-generated events, sends events to the browser's JS which are then placed on a queue for processing. Within Javascript, a single thread retrieves events from the queue and processes them one by one until all have been completed. Once the queue is empty, the thread waits for the next event to arrive. For more information on message queues, you can visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_queue

Answer №2

Put simply, browsers are not actually coded in JavaScript, and it is not JavaScript that manages events.

Initially, UI events are sent to the browser by the operating system, after which the browser processes these messages and schedules a task to construct the DOM Event and dispatch it, allowing the relevant JavaScript callbacks to be executed.

JavaScript is only involved in the final step. It is entirely possible to have a User Agent (UA) that does not support JavaScript but can still handle certain UI events (such as CSS pointer-events, HTML inputs, media controls, etc.)

The way this is handled varies based on the UA being used.

For a long time, in the scenario you mentioned, browsers struggled with processing clicks while the event loop was busy (the latest Internet Explorer, for instance). Modern browsers have implemented multi-process architectures that facilitate communication through Inter-Process Communication using different message queues.

Therefore, even if the "main" renderer thread is occupied carrying out tasks within the event loop, such as running JS code, other processes can run concurrently and add new tasks to the appropriate task queue.
Once the renderer thread finishes its lengthy task, it will process the newly queued task.

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