Current Mechanisms for Handling Asynchronous Operations

New world, old methods

In recent years JavaScript has become the most ubiquitous language in the world and, now, it powers the mission-critical infrastructure of businesses such as Walmart and Netflix, mobile operating systems like Firefox OS, and complex popular applications like Google Docs.

And yet we’re still using good old imperative-style programming to deal with problems that are essentially asynchronous. This is very challenging.

Note: Imperative-style programming is a style where we try to specify all the details of how we achieved a particular result in a program.

JavaScript developers see the language’s lack of threads as a feature, and we usually write asynchronous code using callbacks, promises, and events. However, as we keep adding more concurrency to our applications, the code used to coordinate asynchronous flows becomes unwieldy. The mechanisms that are currently in use all have serious shortcomings that hinder the developer’s productivity and result in fragile applications.

Here’s a quick rundown of the current mechanisms that are in place for handling asynchronous operations, along with the problems that may arise while they are in use.