Once the Node.js developer’s victim of choice, Promise now enjoys healthy adoption on both sides of the stack, with prominent open-source contributors like @sindresorhus visibly leveraging them.
What’s changed?
A Promise-Based Worldview
Just a thought.
What was once considered a mistake by many – inclusion of Promise as a native language API – is now seeing increasingly high rates of adoption. I’d say there’s three reasons for this.
The most obvious one is – recursively – the fact that Promise is now in the language. Promise being in the language drives adoption by itself, through the official endorsement of the spec-writing JavaScript gods. Furthermore, libraries like Babel and bluebird making it all too simple to include spec-compliant Promise-based solutions in any app at very little cost. Anyone writing code for modern browsers or using a modern development toolchain leverages Babel and/or bluebird.
Another reason is that developers are increasingly comfortable with ES6. There have been plenty of tutorials, a couple of books, and many conference talks describing ES6. It’s been roughly a year since the specification was finalized. People now roughly understand the Promise API, and what’s better: the API isn’t changing anymore. Recently, jQuery 3 was released into Promises/A+ compliance, a huge win for native Promise.
Third, there’s async/await. While not the most heavily utilized JavaScript API, async/await is already a stage 3 proposal, and at this point I think we can state confidently and without hesitation that it’ll someday be an official language feature.
The synergy between
Promise,async/await, and generators, is just too good to pass up!
