Workers

app.forkWorker launches a Node child process with an IPC channel — the replacement for Electron's utilityProcess.fork.

import { app, forkWorker, resolveWorkerEntry } from '@owear/core'

const w = app.forkWorker('tree-sitter-worker.js')
w.on('message', (m) => console.log(m))
w.postMessage({ op: 'tokenize', text })
w.on('exit', (code) => console.log('exited', code))
w.kill()

Entry resolution

resolveWorkerEntry(entry: string): string

• absolute paths are used as-is;
• entries starting with . resolve against the current working directory;
• other relative entries resolve against OW_APP_WORKERS (set by ow dev/ow build), or the cwd if it is not defined.

So app.forkWorker('tree-sitter-worker.js') finds the compiled worker from app/workers/tree-sitter-worker.ts.

API

forkWorker(entry: string, options?: ForkWorkerOptions): WorkerHandle

interface ForkWorkerOptions {
  args?: string[]
  cwd?: string
  env?: NodeJS.ProcessEnv
  execArgv?: string[]        // defaults to the current process's execArgv
}

interface WorkerHandle {
  postMessage(message: unknown): void
  on(event: 'message', listener: (message: unknown) => void): void
  on(event: 'exit', listener: (code: number) => void): void
  kill(signal?: NodeJS.Signals): void
  readonly pid: number | undefined
}

The returned handle is synchronous; startup errors are reported through the worker's exit event.

Compilation

The CLI compiles app/workers/**/*.{ts,mts,js,mjs} to dist/workers/ (or .owear/workers/ in dev) and exposes the directory through OW_APP_WORKERS. Workers run on the same real Node as the main process, so they can load N-API addons (see Native addons).

Electron compatibility

Workers ported from Electron that use process.parentPort work unchanged: the worker runner shims it.