Top-level await in JavaScript is a footgun

Re:Top-level await in JavaScript is a footgun by jondubois on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @01:42PM (#12499406)

Yes, top-level await sounds silly. It would freeze the entire app... You couldn't even render a loading progress bar - It would defeat the whole point of loading modules asynchronously.

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Re:Top-level await in JavaScript is a footgun by bmeck on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @01:43PM (#12499417)

incorrect. `await` is a reserved word only in async contexts, the UI thread event loop still runs while `await`ing.

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Re:Top-level await in JavaScript is a footgun by egeozcan on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @02:17PM (#12499755)

If you run an await as a first thing in the top-level, you have nothing in the event loop to run. Await blocks everything after itself, and that is very dangerous if done on the top-level.

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Re:Top-level await in JavaScript is a footgun by BinaryIdiot on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @03:11PM (#12500271)

In that script, yes. But in JavaScript you can have multiple scripts :)

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Re:Top-level await in JavaScript is a footgun by egeozcan on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @03:29PM (#12500434)

> in JavaScript you can have multiple scripts

You mean, you can embed multiple script elements in HTML? Yes. But allowing global await in ES spec means also enabling it in node.

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Re:Top-level await in JavaScript is a footgun by bmeck on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @04:23PM (#12500927)

or you could just do `import('a'); import('b');` to load `a` and `b` in parallel

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