Re:After a year of using Node.js in production
by firasd on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @05:47PM
(#11624502)
I'm not disputing the architectural choices behind Node's async model. I'm talking about syntax. It's cool that you can process multiple promises at the same time, but most of the time I need one promise to complete before continuing. In those cases the way it inverts regular code flow is very unnatural. Like I said, I think more support/usage of 'await' will help.
Look at the following code: https://paste.ee/r/LJnhg
I have function requestFromService and another readFromDB. On a single thread, I issue one request to a service and one to the database server, and you think it makes sense for the thread to just wait around? In javascript, the second I issue those two requests, the thread is available to now serve the next incoming request or do literally anything else while those services take as long or as little as they need.
The code itself could not be more clear as to what will happen, except for maybe the syntax Promise.join(), which was only there to illustrate how easy it is to do concurrent, asynchronous tasks.
You don't have to think twice about what to do while those requests carry out, and it's not like you had to write your code in a complex manner to take advantage of the asynchronous nature of JS, it just inherently works that way. Maybe I have gone and served 5 more requests while the db server was responding, and I didn't have to even be aware of the concurrency whatsoever.