Practical ES6

Chapter 10: ES6 Generators and Iterators: a Developer’s Guide

by Byron Houwens

ES6 brought a number of new features to the JavaScript language. Two of these features, generators and iterators, have substantially changed how we write specific functions in more complex front-end code.

While they do play nicely with each other, what they actually do can be a little confusing, so let’s check them out.

Iterators

Iteration is a common practice in programming and is usually used to loop over a set of values, either transforming each value, or using or saving it in some way for later.

In JavaScript, we’ve always had for loops that look like this:

for (var i = 0; i < foo.length; i++){
  // do something with i
}

But ES6 gives us an alternative:

for (const ...