Mutual Exclusion in JavaScript

I started reading up on some papers, and I've found that the type of mutual exclusion being attempted by Wallace in JavaScript is actually impossible. Totally anonymous mutual exclusion using atomic RW registers cannot be done.

That leaves two choice:

1. One can hand-out thread ids in advance (i.e. assign one to each possible callback) during a stage when one knows the code will have only one thread running

2. Use randomized mutual exclusion algorithms

Personally, I think option #1 is very hard to implement correctly, so option #2 is probably the most feasible. Basically, you randomly generate a thread id for yourself at any time (in fact, you can randomly generate a thread id every time you want to enter a mutex). Then, you can run a symmetric mutual exclusion protocol using atomic RW registers.

I found a paper that seems to give one such algorithm:

"Tight Bounds for Shared Memory Symmetric Mutual Exclusion Problems" by Eugene Styer and Gary L. Peterson.