async
I recently found out that async functions will return a promise implicitly. I've been returning promises explicitly for as long as I can remember and I've never had a linter complain. So I read the documentation and this is what I learned.
Wait, Don't await!
async functions wrap the return value in a promise. This means both functions below are equivalent.
// both functions return a promise
async myFunc(){ return await someAsyncFunc()};
async ourFunc(){ return someAsyncFunc()}async/await under the hood
As someone who worked with promise chains because my node environment did not support async/await, I am ecstatic whenever I don't have to use chains. While reading the documentation, I realized that async functions are still building these promise chains under the hood!
A nice way to think about async/await as written in the docs is Code after each await expression can be thought of as existing in a .then callback.
Understanding exactly how async/await works and how it relates to the previous methods for handling promises will make our lives as developers easier when we need to debug some failed async function.