You Don't Know JS: Async & Performance

Chapter 2. Callbacks

In Chapter 1, we explored the terminology and concepts around asynchronous programming in JavaScript. Our focus is on understanding the single-threaded (one-at-a-time) event loop queue that drives all events (async function invocations). We also explored various ways that concurrency patterns explain the relationships (if any!) between simultaneously running chains of events, or “processes” (tasks, function calls, etc.).

All our examples in Chapter 1 used the function as the individual, indivisible unit of operations, whereby inside the function, statements run in predictable order (above the compiler level!), but at the function-ordering level, events (aka async function invocations) can happen in a variety of orders.

In all these cases, the function is acting as a callback, because it serves as the target for the event loop to “call back into” the program, whenever that item in the queue is processed.

As you no doubt have observed, callbacks are by far the most common way that asynchrony in JS programs is expressed and managed. Indeed, the callback is the most fundamental async pattern in the language.

Countless JS programs, even very sophisticated and complex ones, have been written upon no other async foundation than the callback (with, of course, the concurrency interaction patterns we explored in Chapter 1). The callback function is the async workhorse for JavaScript, and it does its job respectably.

Except…callbacks are not without their shortcomings. ...