Drop async in the frontend?

[paulmelnikow]

My understanding is that the global transform which transforms async calls in the frontend to promises adds a lot of bloat to the frontend build.

Does anyone know if that is true / still true?

We only use async in a few places and I think we could replace these with promises.

[calebcartwright]

Does anyone know if that is true / still true?

Not this is particularly helpful, but I have no idea 😄

[paulmelnikow]

@Daniel15 any chance you could offer some quick insight on this?

[Daniel15]

@paulmelnikow - Just catching up on my emails... Sorry I missed this! Async/await is natively supported by the vast majority of browsers (~91% of users, as per https://caniuse.com/#feat=async-functions). Native async/await is actually more efficient than promises these days:
https://v8.dev/blog/fast-async

And Chrome also has "zero-cost async stack traces", which means error stack traces include the entire async stack when using native async/await (whereas this is prohibitively expensive to do with callbacks or promises)

We could potentially have two bundles: One for modern browsers, and one for legacy browsers.

[PyvesB]

We no longer have any async calls in our frontend. Closing as this is no longer relevant.