Should I use a separate ScriptEngine and CompiledScript instances per each thread?

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You can share a ScriptEngine and CompiledScript objects across threads. They are threadsafe. Actually, you should share them, as a single engine instance is a holder for a class cache and for JavaScript objects’ hidden classes, so by having only one you cut down on repeated compilation.

What you can’t share is Bindings objects. The bindings object basically corresponds to the JavaScript runtime environment’s Global object. The engine starts with a default bindings instance, but if you use it in multithreaded environment, you need to use engine.createBindings() to obtain a separate Bindings object for every thread — its own global, and evaluate the compiled scripts into it. That way you’ll set up isolated global scopes with the same code. (Of course, you can also pool them, or synchronize on ’em, just make sure there’s never more than one thread working in one bindings instance). Once you evaluated the script into the bindings, you can subsequently efficiently invoke functions it defined with ((JSObject)bindings.get(fnName).call(this, args...)

If you must share state across threads, then at least try to make it not mutable. If your objects are immutable, you might as well evaluate the script into single Bindings instance and then just use that across threads (invoking hopefully side-effect free functions). If it is mutable, you’ll have to synchronize; either the whole bindings, or you can also use the var syncFn = Java.synchronized(fn, lockObj) Nashorn-specific JS API to obtain versions of JS functions that synchronize on a specific object.

This presupposes that you share single bindings across threads. If you want to have multiple bindings share a subset of objects (e.g. by putting the same object into multiple bindings), again, you’ll have to somehow deal with ensuring that access to shared objects is thread safe yourself.

As for THREADING parameter returning null: yeah, initially we planned on not making the engine threadsafe (saying that the language itself isn’t threadsafe) so we chose the null value. We might need to re-evaluate that now, as in the meantime we did make it so that engine instances are threadsafe, just the global scope (bindings) isn’t (and never will be, because of JavaScript language semantics.)

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