Using Async/Await Without Babel

Experimental async/await support in Node 7.

Let’s start with a simple example. Say we want to create a function that requests an URL and tells us the status code. Using ES6 promises this is what the code might look like:

With async/await we can simplify the getStatus function a bit. Instead of calling .then() we can rewrite it as a async function and await for the request to be resolved.

It will wait for the promise to resolve in a non-blocking way. However, when trying to run this with node async-await-example you will get an error.

async function getStatus (url) {^^^^^^^^SyntaxError: Unexpected token function

The good news is that async/await has landed in v8 of the JavaScript engine, which is implemented in Node 7. Async/await is added as a experimental feature and can be used with the flag --harmony-async-await.

Start using async/await today by installing Node 7 and running it with:

$ node --harmony-async-await

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