Hey folks! I've been diving into async programming in JavaScript and I'm finding concurrency and race conditions to be pretty challenging. I'm using Promises, async/await, and even tools like Promise.allSettled, but things get complicated really fast, especially when you're working with multiple API calls or parallel operations in a real-world app.
I'd love to hear about some best practices or maybe some unique patterns you use to manage concurrency without turning my code into a mess. How do you balance performance with error handling? Any cool libraries or specific patterns that help you avoid callback hell or unhandled promise rejections? This has been quite a hurdle for me lately, so I'm eager to learn from your experiences!
3 Answers
Lately, I hardly use async/await in my Vue and Solid applications. Instead, I wrap my fetch requests in a composable that keeps track of data, loading, and error states through signals. I save all that in a store, and my components will check those states in computed helpers whenever I’m making multiple calls. If you do end up juggling a lot of promises, helpers like Promise.all or allSettled do a great job. Once you get a feel for how promises work, it becomes a lot more manageable.
One solid approach is to borrow a few principles from functional programming. Focusing on pure functions, using immutable variables, and eliminating side effects can tackle a lot of those pain points you’re facing. Back before React embraced functional programming, front-end JavaScript could be a total headache!
My go-to pattern with async code is to not let any promises just fire and forget. The only exception is when I can't use top-level await in a module. So, I always make sure every promise is awaited to avoid unhandled promise rejections. To steer clear of callback hell, I recommend using async/await, but it's often helpful to mix both styles. You can end up with less messy code if you do it right! What issues are you hitting specifically? Let’s dig into your examples!
I’m dealing with a race condition issue myself where multiple async functions try to update the same variable. For instance, I have a counter that gets incremented concurrently, and sometimes it ends up with a value less than expected. Do you have any suggestions for handling these kinds of shared state updates? Should I explore using locks or queues?