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Transferable RTCDataChannel to dedicated workers

Category
WebRTC
Type
Chromium catches up
Status
In developer trial (Behind a flag) (Chrome 130)
Intent stage
None

Summary

The RTCDataChannel interface is part of the WebRTC standard, and represents a network channel which can be used for bidirectional peer-to-peer transfers of arbitrary data. This feature tracks exposing RTCDataChannel in dedicated workers, and allowing the transfer of RTCDataChannels to them workers. This will help reduce main thread contention and lead to smoother and more reliable WebRTC applications.

Motivation

Enabling RTCDataChannel transfers to workers will improve the performance of WebRTC applications, by offloading network send/receive operations from the main thread to a worker thread. A secondary benefit is improving the ergonomics and design of WebRTC applications, to leverage other worker-exposed APIs. For example, developers can combine an RTCDataChannel in workers with WebCodecs and OffscreenCanvas, to decode and render directly from a worker.

Standards & signals

Samples: https://tguilbert-google.github.io/RTCDataChannel/index.html

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