async/await without try...catch!

When async/await feature came with ECMAScript 2017, it literally brought promises to the next level. In a nutshell, it removes the removing Pyramid of doom effect (a.k.a. Callback hell) and makes asynchronous code easier to read.

If your application rely on an API, I guess you writte a lot of code like this:

try {
  const response = await http.get('https://api.github.com/users/maxpou')
  // do something
} catch (err) {
  // error handling
}

I never been a big fan of try..catch blocks. I like to strive for a minimum level of indentation in my code. Let’s see how we can remove this block!

Wrapper

First, we need to create a wrapper. You can put this function in your project’s shared library:

export function to(promise) {
  return promise.then(data => [null, data]).catch(err => [err, null])
}

As you can see, this function can return 2 different values: the error or the fulfilled value of the promise.

Now in your code, you can remove those try..catch and replace them with the following:

import { to } from 'utils/async-utils'

const [err, response] = await to(http.get('https://api.github.com/users/maxpou'))

if (err) {
  // error handling
}

// do something

🎉 This is it!

Gotcha - don’t try to destructure

In my actual company, we heavily rely on this wrapper. One day, a dev tried to destructure the response object.

// ⚠️ this won't works! ⚠️
const [err, { data }] = await to(http.get('https://api.github.com/users/maxpou'))

In case of an error, this code won’t works. You will have Cannot read property 'data' of null. You can destructure if it’s not defined, even if you don’t use it!

---

About the author

Hey, I'm Maxence Poutord, a passionate software engineer. In my day-to-day job, I'm working as a senior front-end engineer at Orderfox. When I'm not working, you can find me travelling the world or cooking.

Follow me on Bluesky