title: Sharing variables between web workers? [global variables?]
body: <p>Is there any way for me to share a variable between two web workers? (Web workers are basically threads in Javascript)</p>
  
  <p>In languages like c# you have:</p>
  
  <pre><code>public static string message = "";
  static void Main()
  {
   message = "asdf";
   new Thread(mythread).Run();
  }
  public static void mythread()
  {
   Console.WriteLine(message); //outputs "asdf"
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I know thats a bad example, but in my Javascript application, I have a thread doing heavy computations that can be spread across multiple threads [since I have a big chunk of data in the form of an array.  All the elements of the array are independent of each other.  In other words, my worker threads don't have to care about locking or anything like that]</p>
  
  <p>I've found the only way to "share" a variable between two threads would be to create a Getter/setter [via prototyping] and then use postMessage/onmessage...  although this seems really inefficient [especially with objects, which I have to use JSON for AFAIK]</p>
  
  <p>LocalStorage/Database has been taken out of the HTML5 specification because it could result in deadlocks, so that isn't an option [sadly]...</p>
  
  <p>The other possibility I have found was to use PHP to actually have a getVariable.php and setVariable.php pages, which use localstorage to store ints/strings...  once again, Objects [which includes arrays/null] have to be converted to JSON...  and then later, JSON.parse()'d.</p>
  
  <p>As far as I know, Javascript worker threads are totally isolated from the main page thread [which is why Javascript worker threads can't access DOM elements</p>
  
  <p>Although postMessage works, it is slow.</p>