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Async and Await - BandungJS - Mar 2017

Async and Await - BandungJS - Mar 2017

This is talk about concurrency in JS using promises and async/await.

Simon Sturmer

March 27, 2017
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  1. Concurrency Doing multiple tasks in a period of time. (Generally

    order-independent or partially- ordered units of work)
  2. Concurrency is important when waiting on input/output such as network

    requests, reading/ writing from disk, or user input.
  3. Typically, two ways programs wait for IO: • blocking (“synchronous”)

    • Easy to write • Uses multi-threading • Memory and context-switching overhead • non-blocking/event-loop (“asynchronous”) • Single-threaded • High-concurrency with low-memory consumption • Great for UI and IO-bound services rather than CPU- bound
  4. So what happens if you block in JavaScript? There are

    a few things that will block: • alert/prompt/confirm • synchronous XMLHttpRequest (rare) • fs.readFileSync and friends in Node
  5. Callbacks Pros: • Great low-level abstraction • Performant with low

    overhead • Can do almost any async task with callbacks
  6. Callbacks Cons: • Doing things in sequence is hard. Doing

    things in parallel is harder! • Give up constructs such as for/while and try/catch • Error handling is difficult • Code readability suffers and systems become hard to maintain
  7. Plus Error Handling We spend a lot of effort checking

    if an async task failed. 
 We completely lose try/catch.
  8. The Promise Land Thin but powerful abstraction on top of

    callbacks. Solves several problems: • Easy chaining; sequential/parallel tasks • Error handling • Composable; can pass around a representation
  9. It’s better, I Promise In it’s basic form, it looks

    no better than callback style. .. but you actually get a lot more.
  10. Error Handling Attach a single catch()
 
 Exceptions will bubble

    up similar to how it works in synchronous code.
  11. Total Win We get back most of our traditional constructs:

    • for/while • try/catch • readable, sequential program flow • powerful inter-op with promises
  12. It’s just promises • An async function always returns a

    promise. • When we await a promise, our function pauses until the promise is ready (resolved) • We can still use all our favorite promise helpers such as Promise.all()
  13. Pro Tips • Don't forget to await! • Be careful

    about doing too much sequentially when you can actually do it in parallel • Using await in map/filter won't do what you might expect! • Even though it looks synchronous, remember your code has been paused/resumed
  14. You can use this Today! • Chrome • Firefox •

    Node • Use Babel for the rest.