this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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STOP DOING ASYNC (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by Maven@lemmy.world to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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[–] ShortFuse@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Preventing the ui thread from waiting on native IO is what async was created for.

Citation needed. async just a wrapper for Promises. IO isn't related, just commonly used with it.

https://tc39.es/ecma262/multipage/control-abstraction-objects.html#sec-async-functions-abstract-operations-async-function-start

NodeJS's IO and fetch are just promises. (And NodeJS used to use callback(err, response) before adding promises.).

[–] locuester@lemmy.zip 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yes I’m simplifying a LOT, but in the context of background web calls, that was what callbacks became so important for. XMLHttpRequest in IE 5 sparked the Ajax movement and adventures in nested callbacks.

Prior to that, the browser had window.setTimeout and its callback for delays and animation and such - but that’s it.

The main purpose of all this async callback stuff was originally, and arguably still is (in the browser), for allowing the ui event loop to run while network requests are made.

NodeJS didn’t come into the picture for almost 10 years or so.

[–] ShortFuse@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, that's a big simplification and I get it. But the async syntax itself syntax "sugar" for Promises. It's not like C# or Java/Android where it will spawn a thread. If you take a JSON of 1000 rows and attach a promise/await to each of them, you won't hit the next event loop until they all run to completion.

It's a common misconception that asynchronous means "run in background". It doesn't. It means run at end of current call stack.

Prior to that, the browser had window.setTimeout and its callback for delays and animation and such - but that’s it.

And you STILL have to call setTimeout in your async executions or else you will stall your UI.

Again async is NOT background. It's run later. async wraps Promise which wraps queueMicrotask.

Here is a stack overflow that explains it more in detail.

[–] locuester@lemmy.zip 1 points 9 months ago

I’m well aware how async works in the single threaded js environment. All code blocks the main thread! Calling await on an async operation yields back.

You’re right, async is commonly mixed up with multi-threaded. And in fact in many languages the two things work hand in hand. I’m very aware of how it works in JavaScript.

We are agreeing. Don’t need more info.