It strikes me as an interesting development to see that the current definition
of Async/Await (as I see it), is just simple syntactic sugar for `.then()`.
While I, to an extent, see the point of such a command as being useful, I
remain unaware of the exact reasoning why we need to include promises in the
first place. Wouldn't it be so much more powerful to be able to use completely
normal syntax, as you would in synchronous code as well as the option of
promise chains?
For example, take the following code snippet:
async function asyncFunction() { return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
someAsync('data', (err, data) => { if (err) { reject(err); return; }
resolve(data); }); }); }
This seems to be so very confusing for anybody new studying this language,
almost everyone I talk to gets stuck up on some part of it. Wouldn't it be so
very beautiful if we could just do:
async function asyncFunction() { someAsync('data', (err, data) => { async
return [err, data] }) }
When we call this with the `await` keyword, we simply `await` a return. No
special promises or extra keywords needed, everything works as you would expect
it to. This also has the benefit of shortening our required code from 10 lines
to 5 lines, removing a significant proportion of boilerplate code.
async function asyncFunction() { let [err, data] = await asyncFunction() }
Some interesting counterpoints to consider from the #node.js channel on freenode
- "Doesn't this just add complexity to the specification?"
+ Yes, it does mean that people who wish to implement Javascript will have
to spend longer implementing await/async. However, in my opinion it's a better
solution that forcing everyone who wishes to use async/await to also learn how
to use `new Promise()` and what the `reject()` and `resolve()` do. Due to how
often you have to deal with asynchronous code in Javascript, often people come
across this issue very early on in learning the language, making is as easy as
adding an extra `async` before your return statement seems like an acceptable
exchange.
- "Why not just automatically promisify functions using a library like
bluebird?"
+ Similar to the previous question, I honestly feel that forcing people to
learn the API for yet another library in order to be able to do such a simple
task is much more taxing than in this method.
- "I just don't like the async return"
+ Originally it was just a return, but a friend pointed out this ran into
issues that it would simply return from the last function. What I thought
would be much easier was some sort of keyword that makes it return from the
async function, instead of any other functions. To me, `async` came naturally,
but this is just my first suggestion on the future of Javascript, and I'd be
interested to know if you have any better suggestions._______________________________________________
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