First off, this is a tremendously concise and digestible article. Thanks for that — it can certainly be difficult to distill concepts like this into an easy to understand format.
If I can add on to what Cory House said — this line stuck out to me:
In case you missed it, Node now supports async/await out of the box since version 7.6.
I feel like this is the unspoken secret of working in Node with es6/7/ — the vast majority of articles, tutorials, and courses imply that flashy new esX syntax can be used everywhere because it is supported “out of the box”. It is a subtle and very important detail that the box itself isn’t supported in many environments!
When I was learning es6, I found many tutorials infuriating because they cruised right past mentioning this.
What’s funnier still is that many modern IDEs (Atom, VSCode, Sublime) will happily complain about es6 syntax as not being recognized, but don’t really have good resources to point devs to about how to configure npm or package.json or babel to work with newer syntaxes. Moreover, I’ve yet to come across a good, simple place to start with explanations of this for devs who are newer to Node.
To boot, it seems like a cruel joke that the FAQ on nodejs.org only talks about how one can contribute to node, babel’s website seems to assume you already know how to use it, and docs for IDEs don’t often come close to being helpful.
It’s a funny thing that es6/7 is one place where I’ve never felt expert enough to definitively understand how and when I can use new features of the language. What a world!
Sorry for the rant/soapbox session. This article is really very helpful. Maybe it’s time I start that YouTube channel I’ve been meaning to put together…
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