If you’re used to using Promises, async / await is an elegant way to make your javascript more legible. It evaluates as synchronous code but returns a promise that executes on the next microtask.

Let’s jump right in and poke around. Open up the babel repl and code along with me. Take a simple function and add async to the beginning:

async function sayHello() {

return 'hello';

} console.log(sayHello()); // => Promise {}

You’ll see that calling this function returns a Promise rather than “hello”. This is because anything returned from an async function is automatically wrapped in a promise. In order to log “hello” we could do this:

sayHello()

.then(str => console.log(str)) // => 'hello'

OK so what about await?

First, write a function that returns a promise:

function mapLater(arr, fn, time) {

return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {

setTimeout(() => {

resolve(arr.map(fn));

}, time);

});

}

Pretty straight forward, we map over an array after given amount of time. Now let’s use that in an async function.

async function addAndMultiply(arr) {

const added = await mapLater(arr, i => i + 2, 2000);

const multiplied = await mapLater(added, i => i * 2, 2000);



console.log(multiplied);

} addAndMultiply([1, 3, 6, 20]);

console.log('hello') // => 'hello'

// 4 secs later => [6, 10, 16, 44]

You’ll see that “hello” is logged before we are returned our array. Our async function is non-blocking.

It’s important to note that await must always be inside of an async closure. Calling it in the global scope or in a function without the the async keyword will throw an error.

Handling errors

Imagine something goes wrong with our original mapLater function:

...

setTimeout(() => {

reject('nope');

}, time);

Currently, we have no way of surfacing the error in our async addAndMultiply function. When we run it, the function will fail silently. To handle errors, one solution is to use try / catch:

async function addAndMultiply(arr) {

try {

const added = await mapLater(arr, i => i + 2, 2000);

const multiplied = await mapLater(added, i => i * 2, 2000);

console.log(multiplied);

} catch(err) {

console.error(err); // 2 secs later => 'nope'

}

}

Since errors bubble up by default, another practical solution would be to handle errors at the async entry point:

intricatelyNestedAsyncFunc().catch(err => console.error(err));

Real World

Use it today! So many great libraries provide APIs that return promises. For example, if you’re using fetch to retrieve data, you can start doing things like:

async function getProfileData(id) {

try {

const users = await getUser(id);

...

} catch {

...

}

}

To use async / await now you’ll need to use Babel’s transform-async-to-generator.