On callback hell

I am planning to write an article in the coming months about callback hell, where I will propose a new approach which is imho much better (even than JS promises/async/await).

Suffice it to say for now there are tangible benefits about functions that are of dual synchronous/asynchronous nature depending on how they are invoked. In QED, the following lines do exactly as expected:

println("Starting...");
Timer(4000); // wait four seconds
println("Timer 1 done!");
Timer(3000); // wait three other seconds
println("Timer 2 done!");

However, calling Timer() using new makes Timer calls asynchronous (without creating threads in order to keep generated JS code compatibility). Here is an asynchronous version.

println("Starting...");
new Timer(4000) -> println("Timer 1 done!");
new Timer(3000) -> println("Timer 2 done!");

This will print “Timer 2 done” 1 second before “Timer 1 done”. Both timers work asynchronously. These two examples work well on the online demo page should you try them out.

So the way to sequentially execute asynchronous tasks will be something like this:

void asyncTask(...) {
    // execute all async functions synchronously (without using new)
    asynFn1(...);
    asyncFn2(...);
    ...
    return();
}

// use new here to make whole task async
new asyncTask(...) -> <do something when complete>;
println("Async task started");
...

Much more detail will be provided in the upcoming article…