[kragen]

if the implied contrast is with cooperative multitasking, it's exactly the opposite: they're there to expose the event loop in a way you can't ignore. if the implied contrast is with setTimeout(() => { ... }, 0) then yes, pretty much, although the difference is fairly small—implicit variable capture by the closure does most of the same hiding that await does

[nottorp]

Not asking about old JavaScript vs new JavaScript. Asking about explicit event loop vs hidden event loop with fancy names like timeout, async, await...

[kragen]

do you mean the kind of explicit loop where you write

    for (;;) {
        int r = GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0);
        if (!r) break;
        if (r == -1) croak();
        TranslateMessage(&msg);
        DispatchMessage(&msg);
    }

or, in yeso,

      for (;;) {
        yw_wait(w, 0);
        for (yw_event *ev; (ev = yw_get_event(w));) handle_event(ev);
        redraw(w);
      }

async/await doesn't always hide the event loop in that sense; python asyncio, for example, has a lot of ways to invoke the event loop or parts of it explicitly, which is often necessary for integration with software not written with asyncio in mind. i used to maintain an asyncio cubesat csp protocol stack where we had to do this

to some extent, though, this vitiates the concurrency guarantees you can otherwise get out of async/await. software maintainability comes from knowing that certain things are impossible, and pure async/await can make concurrency guarantees which disappear when a non-async function can invoke the event loop in this way. so i would argue that it goes further than just hiding the event loop. it's like saying that garbage collection is about hiding memory addresses: sort of true, but false in an important sense

[nottorp]

What worries me is we may have a whole generation who doesn't know about the code you posted above and thinks it's magic or worse, real multiprocessing.

[kragen]

okay but is that what you meant by 'hiding the event loop' or did you mean something different