Recently, I read yet another blog post complaining about how concurrency is hard in Node.js. As is often the case, the examples highlighting the problems are leaving a lot to be desired.

Since I’ve written quite a bit of Node.js, I’d like to present an example of concurrency style in Node.js that isn’t a “strawman” often touted as the bane of Node.js’ existence.

EventEmitter

If you’ve been around Node.js for a little bit, you might have heard something along the lines “everything is a stream”, or “everything is an event emitter.” There is a reason for that.

Let’s take the example from the blog post I mentioned:

If you find yourself doing the above, you’re either in a rush, or should stop and rethink your design. Here’s how to accomplish a similar thing using continuation passing:

Why is this “better”? Well, for one, adding error handling is straightforward:

We can add telemetry like so:

We can alter control flow without rewriting the “callback hell”:

In general, the EventEmitter will be a better idea. I hope you’ll find some of these hints interesting and find writing control flow in Node.js a bit more friendly.