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by soulofmischief 16 days ago
While non-trivial in several ways, there are standard Web APIs such as Web Workers, Web Audio API, OffscreenCanvas, SharedArrayBuffer, etc. which help to construct modern, multi-threaded applications in JavaScript. Hopefully today, any experienced JavaScript-focused web developer should be experienced with more async paradigms than just async/await.

I think these APIs address real issues, but it also makes the entire stack more complex when integrated language support might be better for some features. But, keeping things separate does mean JavaScript as a language is fairly portable and backwards-compatible, if you ignore Web API support. Still, a lot of other languages feel more batteries-included and have more elegant multi-threaded async fundamentals.
1 comments
moritzwarhier 15 days ago
Yes, my horizon is not quite that limited, but in fact I mostly get to use these capabilities you mention in hobby projects, apart from a few exceptions, given the stack I currently work on for a living. I had Worker threads in mind when I wrote the comment but considered it a disgression.

Didn't want to say that JS cannot provide other paradigms for asynchronous code apart from the async function syntax and Promises.

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