Why choose async/await over threads?

Re:Why choose async/await over threads? by MuffinFlavored on Monday March 25, 2024 @02:50PM (#39819947)

It is executed by your runtime which may or may not behind the scenes be using a single thread for your execution and/or the underlying I/O/eventing going on underneath, no?

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Re:Why choose async/await over threads? by throwitaway1123 on Monday March 25, 2024 @09:22PM (#39823336)

Most JS runtimes are multi-threaded behind the scenes. If you start a node process:

  node -e "setTimeout(()=>{}, 10_000)" &

Then wait a second and run:

  ps -o thcount $!

Or on macOS:

  ps -M $!

You'll see that there are multiple threads running, but like others have said, it's completely opaque to you as a programmer. It's basically just an implementation detail.

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Re:Why choose async/await over threads? by throwitaway1123 on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @11:56AM (#39829357)

If you need true parallelism of course you can opt-in to web workers (called worker threads in node), or the node-specific child_process.fork, or cluster module.

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