Question

I’ve got an asynchronous application, meaning that at any given time there can be N events. Is there a known algorithm for doing mutual exclusion for N threads, without hardcoding each thread to have an ID?

Answer 1

I don’t think Javascript per se has object locking – because Javascript is basically single-threaded. You might be able to find a library or implementation that runs several threads of Javascript code – but are they all running in the same variable-space? They will need to communicate with each other somehow.

Assuming your multiple threads can share a static mutex variable somehow, and insofar as you assume ‘++‘ is considered an atomic operation for the system that is doing your threading, how about this?

int mutex = 0;
mutuallyExclusiveOperation(){
  succeed=false;
  while(!succeed){
    while(mutex>0){ sleep();  }
    m=mutex++;   //"Simultaneously" read and increment
    if(m>0)mutex--;
    else{
      doMutuallyExclusiveThing();
      succeed=true;
      mutex--;
    }
 }
}