Async Functions for ECMAScript

The introduction of Promises and Generators in ECMAScript presents an opportunity to dramatically improve the language-level model for writing asynchronous code in ECMAScript. The spec text can be found here.

This proposal is implemented in a regenerator which can compile ES5 code containing async and await down to vanilla ES5 to run in existing browsers and runtimes.

This repo contains a complete example using a large number of the features of the proposal. To run this example:

npm install
regenerator -r server.asyncawait.js | node

Debatable Syntax & Semantics

Awaiting Non-Promise

When the value passed to await is a Promise, the completion of the async function is scheduled on completion of the Promise. For non-promises, behaviour aligns with Promise conversion rules according to the proposed semantic polyfill.

Surface syntax

Instead of async function/await, the following are options:

• function^/await
• function!/yield
• function!/await
• function^/yield