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I found it somewhat interesting psychologically how much of a paradigm shift async/await seems to have caused, even though it's really just syntactical sugar.
by xg15 5y ago
I found it somewhat interesting psychologically how much of a paradigm shift async/await seems to have caused, even though it's really just syntactical sugar.
It changed absolutely zero about JavaScript's processing model - but because it "looks" like traditional multithreaded code, people seemed to start thinking about it like that, suddenly asking about synchronization, locks, etc.
You could have asked all those questions already during callback-hell times, but I don't remember reading any blogs about that stuff back then.
- klabb3 5y agoAgreed. People conflate concurrency with parallelism a lot, so I guess people see async, squint, "hey this is just like threads", and then start grabbing for locks. It appears to me that Javascript has painted itself into a corner where it needs to maintain 3 concurrency models for the forseeable future (callbacks, async, service workers), which is unfortunate for ecosystem interop. It's a shame because JS had this quite amazing property for such an old language that its concurrency model was simple, approachable and performant (within that single thread). Now that people build more general purpose stuff with it, those days are fading.