Asynchrony_under_the_hood(shelley_vohr, jsconf_eu, 2018)

This talk will explore the conceptual underpinnings of asynchronous programming options, and the drawbacks and advantages to each. JS has supported callbacks since 2009, and as years have gone by it’s added support for promises, generators, and now async/await. On a surface level, each of these techniques seeks to answer a question of how to access data not immediately available, but a deeper look into how each works on a granular level will show their implementation differences and how these differences affect usage. We’ll also take a look at how intermediate values, and errors are affected by each method. I’ll walk through a series of scenarios so you can better visualize performance differences, and how each method propagates data through the stack and the event loop. Finally, I’ll talk about where the future of async may be headed. Armed with new knowledge from this deep dive, the potentially treacherous road to fully understanding async will hopefully become a smoother ride!